The muscular guy in an athletics vest tells his wiry younger brother to move as he does. To take in the views, they’re going to climb a soaring electricity transmission tower. It takes nerve, strength, stamina and grace. They’re sons of a Jamaican-born single mum. Francis, in his final year of school, protects and guides Michael. Don’t show your feelings in your face, he tells him. Project strength. He’s evidently worked out in the gym, is socially confident, popular. He hangs out at a barber shop, and we see him working in the amateur sound studio set up in a backroom there.
Brother is a drama about the construction of masculinity, about life options. Set on an estate in Scarborough, Toronto, it beautifully depicts the brothers’ relationship and inner lives – at early primary school, as older teenagers, and later when Francis is no longer around. It’s convincing and compelling, gets their strengths and vulnerabilities, and their love and care for each other – and for their strict hard-working mum, putting in long hours and nightshifts, yet hardly able to afford to do anything special for her boys at Christmas.
