Themes
According to producer Sergei Selyanov, one of the main goals of Brother was to capture the transition from the "communal system of life" under socialism to the "individual responsibility" of capitalism. He noted that "in the 1990s, the individual had a chance to realize himself to the fullest," but family ties lost meaning. Balabanov wanted to show the importance and value of lost connections, even though Danila was alone in confronting all the circumstances of the world around him.
Literary critic and publicist Viktor Toporov, studying the draft version of the script, noted that it is connected with other Balabanov films, both previous and subsequent, through various details:
Balabanov's integrity becomes especially obvious in the process of reading the film scripts he wrote, the internal connections between which become something like a single circulatory system.
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There is one amazing thread sticking out of the script of Brother, and by pulling on it, almost half of Balabanov's work can be unraveled. Danila's "mature" girlfriend, a tram driver who has been pretty battered by life, turns out to be an inveterate bottom here: she likes being tortured and she keeps in the closet - and readily uses on herself - almost the entire arsenal of SM. Which, on the one hand, ties her together (forgive me this pun) with both the "porn divas" from Freaks and the daughter of the district committee secretary from Cargo 200, and on the other, in a purely Fassbinderian way, turns her into the long-suffering Mother Russia!
Film critic Anton Dolin describes Danila as "a man who has fallen out of context, living in a time of great change, but who has ceased to feel History." In his opinion, Danila needs his close and dear ones, but he does not find them, or finds in them something other than what he was looking for:
A character close to the viewer, almost family, living in the world of the film - the main, if not the only film for the entire 1990s, exhaustively describing and summarizing that turning point decade. And, of course, the main one for Balabanov. It does not yet have the postcard popular style of Brother 2 nor the hard guignol of Cargo 200, but it no longer smells of the esoteric thoughtfulness of Happy Days and The Castle. But there is what Balabanov would later define as "fantastic realism," where unvarnished documentary borders on extreme conventionality. Tough, clear, dashing, frank, naive, poetic, musical, not containing a single unnecessary frame or word. With amazing acting, its organic nature and energy going far beyond the concept of "acting" - like De Niro in Taxi Driver or Huppert in The Piano Teacher. Perfectly fitting the definition of a "masterpiece".
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Brother is either a tragedy or a comedy of the loneliness of the hero, who dreamed of loved ones, but ended up with his pistol in the Lutheran cemetery in the company of a German and a director who is scared to death of him. It is as if he has a presentiment that new times are about to come, in which there will be no place for either the author or the actor. And the hero will be appropriated and called "brother" by the trivial thieves from Krugly's gang - those who unsuccessfully tried to kill him in the film. In fact, Danila Bagrov did not have any brothers. He was the only one.
Twenty years after the film's release, Viktor Sukhorukov, who played Viktor in the film, noted both the heroism and contradictory nature of Danila:
The need for heroes has always existed, starting from epics, bylinas, and fairy tales. What is a hero? He is the main horse in the troika. That black horse that pulls this chariot, cart, wheelbarrow, carriage. Do we have one today? No. A hero must be born. Only not through ideology, but through resistance, through a clash of positions.
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Danya Bagrov served his country on a certain front, returned and decided to help his brother. Each of us has such a contradiction of good, evil, love, hate, strength, and weakness mixed in us. In this contradiction, we must find a hero who will unite the weak and the strong in himself - and say: "Yes, you can live with this! And not lose, and get rich, and be strong, and be saved."
Journalist and critic Yuri Saprykin defined Danila's personality as a blank slate, on which are listed the names of his closest relatives, a few moral truisms ("the weak must be protected"), several innate social instincts ("I'm not very fond of Jews") and the name of his favorite band ("Nautilus Pompilius"). Saprykin characterizes Bagrov's signature unflappable shooting style as "the fastest movement towards the goal, with all ethical corners cut off; the simplest solution for any problem, he is like a bullet that flies in a straight line."
Danila aims at a businessman with the same readiness as he does at an ordinary bandit or a careless husband, and he would shoot a random passerby with the same thoughtless readiness if he were in the bullet's path. Class enmity is absent from his simple value grid, where only the division into friends and foes is important, and with the exception of the Tatar, who is always a friend because he is a brother, this division is always established by chance, according to the situation.
Saprykin also agrees with the author of Balabanov's biography, Maria Kuvshinova, regarding the role of Hoffman, who he see as a kind of alter ego of Balabanov.
