Music is of course the primary draw of a documentary like Los Hermanos/The Brothers. Directors Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider navigate geographical and political borders to tell the story of Ilmar Gavilán and Aldo López-Gavilán, brothers and world class musicians who grew up worlds away from each other. But a tense undercurrent runs through the 84-minute feature. That conflict, and the subtlety with which it’s rendered, makes the film stand out in a world full of good music documentaries.
The Gavilán brothers were born in Havana in the ‘70s, the sons of composer Guido López-Gavilán and concert pianist Teresita Junco. Ilmar’s instrument was the violin, and at 14 his talent was so promising that he went to study in the Soviet Union, accompanied by his mother. Aldo, several years younger, stayed in Cuba, and watched from afar as his big brother’s career took off. Jarmel and Schneider spend the early part of the film focusing on that childhood separation; instead of letters, Aldo would send cassette tapes to his brother abroad, and as Ilmar explains how he would listen to them and hear the sea outside the family’s apartment in Cuba, and hear family members walking around as Aldo told him what was happening back home, tears roll down his cheeks.
But much like the relationship between the U.S. and Cuba, all is not smooth in this story of brotherly love. When Ilmar visits his brother back home, tensions flare up, and they begin as soon as he arrives. When Aldo goes to pick up his brother at the airport, Ilmar is nowhere to be found. Later in the film, Aldo travels to New York to visit his big brother, but when Ilmar arrives at the airport—where’s Aldo?
Another director might have left such seemingly throwaway scenes on the cutting room floor, but these frustrating moments of border crossing seem to sum up the difficulty in crossing political and emotional borders. The specifics of this tension are only hinted at. Aldo may have been a little resentful of his big brother’s world travels. As the brothers begin to play music together after all these years, the differences in influence become clear, and Aldo’s training in classical and jazz idioms seem to have made him a more expressive artist than Ilmar, a fine technician happy to play his little brother’s compositions.
While the difference in artistic temperaments is plain here, political tensions are in play as well. When Ilmar is in Cuba, his brother shows him around the government-run stores, where produce is cheaper but not as good as at the tourist-priced farmer’s market, and choices are limited. To some degree Aldo is showing his brother, hey, this country and its system takes care of us, but to actually see what that means is sobering. In another scene, their father Guido, still alive and living in Cuba, waxes about the ideals of the revolution, one of the brothers says in voiceover that he doesn’t agree with his father on everything, but neither he nor the film opens up about it.
The husband-and-wife directing team has personal ties to Cuba. Schneider’s father was given shelter there as a child refugee fleeing Nazi Germany. In press notes, Jarmel and Schneider lament that most Americans reduce Cuba, “to either an island paradise or socialist prison,” adding, “We rarely hear the perspectives of Cubans themselves.” With its bilingual title, Los Hermanos/The Brothers hopes to share some of those Cuban perspectives. It’s fitting that near the end of the film, the brothers play a concert in a small town in upstate New York—on Independence Day. That people from different backgrounds can still come together for the American Dream is something to make music about.
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