A not entirely perfect but still admirable film, tackling a subject not often spoken about
Hackney in some senses has become in recent years a new mecca for gay people, with the influx of arty hipsters, polysexual pubs and late-night licensed warehouses on Mare Street playing host to nights like Gutterslut and the like. Yet side by side with this new world there is still the original Hackney living and breathing; ‘the endz’, of poverty, gangs, drugs and guns, where the young and angry rioters rose from in that hot summer. Here homosexuality is only visible by its very palpable absence, where young men are simply not gay. But does this public absence mean that no young man harbours homosexual desire? Seemingly, no. And this is what Sally El Hosain’s film ‘My Brother the Devil’ approaches.
Unfortunately I should have warned you of plot spoilers, for the structure of the film is such that this homosexuality is only revealed as a twist. It centres upon two teenage Muslim family brothers, both involved with gangs and drug-running, with one brother beginning to suspect the other is a terrorist as he starts acting strangely. Perhaps the fact that this brother’s real desire is only revealed in the second half hampens how much depth El Hosain can devote to his problems of being gay in such a world, but she spends much of the first half exploring the muscular, masculine setting of a young male gang, and its idolised paradigms of strength and respect. The viewer sees that a perceived weakness such as homosexuality is impossible to tolerate here.
The film feels a little sensational at times, with cliche occasionally dogging at its scenes, but it mostly involves the viewer throughout. The young actors playing the lead roles are good and carry emotionally heavy scenes well on their shoulders. El Hosain does not strive to give answers as to what can be explicitly done to make homosexuality more acceptable on the rundown estates of the endz, with the gay brother has to move away at the film’s end. But it does not take a great leap of the imagination to see that sorting out and improving these young men’s lives, so that they are not trapped in a no-prospects state of drugs and guns and gang wars, would be the first answer to changing cultural attitudes, whether they be gay or straight underneath.
