Brother Sun, Sister Moon
review by Ron Reed | posted 1/01/2004
 1 of 3
Director Franco Zeffirelli is often accused of sentimentality, and this 1973 film and its flower power sensibility plays right into that expectation. St. Francis of Assisi is presented as the original hippie, complete with trippy folk songs and a "love will conquer all" pseudo-philosophy that gets little cred in our more savvy and cynical day.
It's too bad Brother Sun, Sister Moon has that reputation, because there's much more to the film than that. If we're embarrassed by the movie's simplistic rejection of war and materialism, how much more uncomfortable we would be with St. Francis himself? As easy (and tempting) as it may be to discount Donovan's "get high on God" lyrics, it's much harder (but just as tempting) to try to dodge the words of Jesus that Francis constantly quotes: "You cannot serve both God and money!" Certain aspects of the gospel fly in the face of Western consumerism, which is often quick to criticize anyone naive enough to take Christ's words at face value. (Improbably, the script was co-written by '70s iconoclast Lina Wertmuller, who would go on to write Swept Away and Seven Beauties. Such knowledge lends a certain weight to Brother Sun's critique of bourgeois materialism: as wrong-headed as she was, Wertmuller was utterly serious about her radical leftist politics, and it's intriguing to think of her making common cause with St. Francis.)
It's easy to criticize the acting in Brother Sun, particularly that of Graham Faulkner in the lead role. Still, it's not so much a bad performance as it is reflective of its time. Four years earlier, Leonard Whiting did a similar turn in the title role of Zeffirelli's widely-praised Romeo and Juliet, complete with the requisite running-through-fields-of-flowers sequence, neither less nor more cloying than Faulkner as Francesco. That's how Idealistic Young Men were supposed to act and, within the convention of the day, these youthful actors are just fine. There is a certain fey staginess to these performances, which partly comes from the era and partly from the director's background in live theater and opera. If you can't get past it, this film won't work for you. But for anyone who can, there's a lot to appreciate in Zeffirelli's hagio-pic.
Visually, the film is gorgeous—justifying its Academy Award nominations for art decoration and set decoration. If the decision to release this out-of-step-with-the-zeitgeist movie on DVD seems questionable, some of those questions will be answered by the vivid colors and eye-catching composition. Francesco's father was a cloth merchant, trading in beautifully dyed, richly textured fabrics from exotic lands: the opulence is tangible, the appeal of such riches undeniable. Assisi's young soldiers gather in the church to be blessed by the bishop before departing for the Crusades, standing arrayed in cobalt-blue battle dress or sitting astride horses clad in copper and silver colored armor, their helmets a kind of death mask, echoed in the jewel-encrusted Christ on the church's ornate crucifix. There is a sustained image of Francis's face covered in cloth, which clearly evokes the shroud of Turin. For the first fifteen minutes of the film we repeatedly view him through gauzy fabric: a death-shroud between him and the life he knew. At one point we hover above his canopied bed, a casket made of translucent cloth.
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