From Beginning to End (2009)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Best movie ever!

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Finally I got the chance to watch this movie and I have to say it's one of the greatest movies I ever seen! Even having a hard theme the actors performed amazing passion touching me. It's so controversial but so true and is about the love in its most peculiar form. It's caught my attention even more because it's a Brazilian movie, country where homosexuality still is a very delicate thing. this movie made me smile, tear up, and laugh a lot. It's just so different than any other gay movies I've seen. It lets people know that being gay is so much more than just like men. Its a great thing. I will definitely watch this movie again. This is the kind of movie that I could watch again and again and still feel the same way towards it. I definitely recommend it!

I knew this was going to be icky. I'm sorry but I'm no fan of incest. However I was open minded enough to check it out and see what I could make out of it.What did I watch?Nothing. Nothing happened. I had lots of bad acting and no story at all. There is no conflict and therefore no resolution. It's just the writer's wishful vision of incest within a family with money where they can shrug it off and say "that relationship will be something you will have to work out by yourselves" ...like a couple...of brothers. Are you kidding me??? It's like "Oh, well...have fun with your incest, my loved ones". Even the trainer is like: "Oh...you haven't been apart, right? How nice! (Wink)" There is no life outside their bubble and even when they travel to Argentina another bubble waits for them. It would have actually been kind of fun finding out that the guy in Argentina died after mentioning how inappropriate their relationship was. That would have created some excitement. Instead of that we have a lot of time with the bad actress playing mom and the kids being terrible as well...and then the beauty of the models just "being". I guess some users here wrote positive things just because of the male nudity. Come on! We have to be objective. This doesn't even get to be pretentious or artsy fartsy. It only has a beautiful photography and that is all.

I'm not sure what to make of this film. It is undoubtedly the most romantic portrait of homosexual male incest ever put on the screen. The two (half) brothers in question stare tenderly at each other almost every second, say things like, "To understand our love, they'd have to turn the world upside down", and even exchange wedding rings (!!!). The film approves so much of this relationship that the only drama it can find is one brother's opportunity to study in Russia for the Olympics, which will separate him from his paramour for three years. There's some mild suspense as to whether this hiatus will push one or both brothers into a more socially acceptable (homo or hetero) sex life, then a rather abrupt ending. While it is refreshing that the movie avoids the usual Lifetime TV melodramatic approach ("We just...couldn't...STOP!!!"), it's rather bizarre that the brothers' relatives and friends never protest or even ask uncomfortable questions; everyone else in the movie just wants to avoid the subject. And the structure compounds the problem; the movie lingers on "poetic", eventually redundant scenes of the boys' childhood (long after we get the idea) then suddenly leaps forward several years (killing off two principal characters) to the start of their sexual relationship--we never really see the decision made, and the moment of no return seems to happen between scenes. The subject is raised, then glossed over with golden cinematography and a near-constant underscoring of "tasteful" neo-classical mood music (i.e., much piano noodling cushioned by aching strings) which stops at crucial moments. Is it seemly for an incest movie to be so inoffensive?

I don't understand why mutually consenting sex between brothers near the same age is a big deal. It's not as if they would produce deformed offspring. That particular taboo makes no sense to me. I'm not advocating gay incest, but horror at the idea of sex between brothers – even in a movie, and even among gay men – mystifies me. I've never been at all attracted to my own brother, but two brothers' falling in love in a movie does not make me the least bit uncomfortable. I don't feel compelled to try to twist it into something else that's more acceptable.People who say it's easy to forget that Francisco and Thomás are brothers in the latter half of the movie must be TRYING to forget it, because the movie never stops affirming the fact that that's what they are. Fighting that battle while trying to enjoy a movie must detract a lot from the enjoyment.This is a flawed but interesting and unusual movie, and I can understand why even the many positive reviews it gets have trouble describing it. It has been called a fairy tale because Francisco and Thomás seem to live in a dream world as cut off from the real world as Sleeping Beauty in her castle. But aren't all young lovers like that? Isn't that what love and hormones do to young people? Doesn't the rest of the world tend to fall away when the beloved comes into view? That's how it was when I was young.So to say that this is a fairly tale is simply to say that it is a love story. It's an unusual love story, but fundamentally it is just like any other romance movie. If anything, its depiction of the all-consuming ecstasy of young love is MORE realistic than most movies are, not less.Others have emphasized the parents' evident oblivion or even acquiescence to what is going on under their noses, but that seems to me like just another symptom of the irrational taboo I mentioned earlier. It's like: "What those boys are doing is WRONG! Why don't their parents stop it?" But, again, I ask: Why? Who is hurting whom? Nobody that I can see.When they're children, they simply love each other and love to be together, and they are freely affectionate with each other. Is that bad? Why? Should the mother slap her son when he kisses his younger brother on the head or puts his arm around him or holds him while they sleep? Why? Is fighting better? Is sibling rivalry better than sibling affection? Evidently it is to many people.Neither of those is what I see as a weakness in this movie. It's true that the movie is unreal, but what seems most unreal to me is not the brothers' relationship with each other or with their parents. That's just an extraordinarily loving and mutually accepting family, which is almost never seen in a movie or in real life but should be everybody's ideal of what a family ought to be. If that's not the unconditional love people rave about nowadays, I don't know what is.What seems most unreal to me is the other adults' relationships with each other, the fantastically loving relationships between exes and in-laws and friends who are NOT in love with each other, who are NOT caught up in the heady ecstasy of hormones and young love. That excess of affection is just plain weird.Another weakness I see is in the dialog. The core story about the brothers is fine – it's a love story – but what people say to each other is stilted and awkward, not at all the way real people talk. It's like the way people talk in TV commercials. And the problem is not just in the English subtitles, which actually are very good: what they're saying in Portuguese sounds just as phony.And the final weakness I see is in the direction. The director seems to be trying to make something besides JUST a love story, but what that other something is never comes clear. It feels as if he is intentionally trying to make it an allegory, or an epic myth, or a ballet, or something else abstract that wrestles constantly with the extremely simple love story which the movie actually is.The scene in which the adult brothers slowly undress for the first time as they face each other across the room is particularly strange, like something out of a kabuki performance. That obscure tension between what the movie is and what the director is trying to make it be doesn't ruin the movie, but it IS distracting.All four actors who play the two brothers as children and then as adults are very good and very beautiful, inside and out. What the director did an EXCELLENT job of is getting straight actors (which I assume they all are) to be so convincingly loving toward each other. Every affectionate gesture, every touch, every loving look is totally convincing. That could NEVER happen in an American or Canadian movie, or even in a European movie, and I've never seen it in any other movie from Latin America. It is a unique and astonishing accomplishment.The director also gets credit for the movie's other great accomplishment, which is simply that it got made. A movie about love, passion, unshakable devotion, loyalty, innocence, tenderness and limitless generosity between two men is rarer than hens' teeth. The scene in which they exchange wedding rings alone together at home is one of the sweetest, sexiest scenes I have ever seen. I have never seen any other movie that even comes close to the love between these two men, and I have seen hundreds and hundreds of gay movies. This is far from the best of them, but it is the most wonderful.