From Beginning to End

Brazilian director Aluizio Abranches built his 2009 drama From Beginning to End (original title Do Começo ao Fim) around a bond that most families would rather not discuss. Thomás and Francisco are half-brothers raised in comfort and affection in Rio de Janeiro, and the film tracks how that closeness turns romantic once they reach adulthood. Rafael Cardoso plays Thomás at 20; João Gabriel Vasconcellos is Francisco at 25. Júlia Lemmertz and Fábio Assunção appear as their parents, Julieta and Alexandre, with Jean Pierre Noher and Louise Cardoso rounding out the cast.

Abranches wrote and directed, and the production came through Lama Filmes with a modest budget typical of Brazilian independent cinema. The film opened in Brazil in late November 2009 and played festivals abroad, drawing attention less for scale than for its subject. Reviews split along predictable lines: some praised the sincerity of the central performances, others found the tone too polished for the material. Its 6.5 rating on IMDb, drawn from a small voter pool, reflects that divide more than any consensus.

The genre label says romance and drama, but the film is really a study of intimacy under pressure. It avoids melodrama in favor of quiet domestic scenes, and it treats the brothers' relationship as an emotional fact rather than a scandal to be judged. That restraint is the movie's signature, and also the thing that frustrates viewers who wanted a harder look at the consequences. [edit]

Julieta, a warm and somewhat bohemian woman living in Rio de Janeiro, is raising her young son Francisco when she meets Alexandre, a more conventional professional man who already has a small son of his own, Thomás. The two households merge, and the film's early passages are deliberately idyllic: a sunlit, affectionate, comfortably middle-class home in which the adults are loving and the children are indulged. What the film establishes immediately, and with great care, is the extraordinary closeness between the two boys. There is no rivalry or resentment at becoming stepbrothers, only an immediate, almost wordless mutual attachment. They sleep in the same room, share secrets, and treat one another as the center of their world.

The narrative then moves forward in time. As adolescents and then young adults, Francisco and Thomás remain inseparable in a way that begins to look different from ordinary brotherly love. Francisco is the more protective, steadier, more outwardly composed of the two; Thomás is more sensitive, more expressive, and more visibly dependent on his brother's presence. The film observes them in domestic scenes, at meals, on holidays, in quiet conversations and moments of physical closeness, and gradually makes clear that their affection has a romantic and erotic dimension. The central tension is not whether they love each other, which the film treats as settled and sincere, but how that love can exist in the world: within a family that has no framework for it, and in a society that would condemn it.

The parents' discovery, or rather their dawning recognition, forms the film's principal dramatic engine. Julieta, who has always prized openness and affection, is forced to reckon with the fact that the closeness she encouraged has become something she never imagined. Alexandre, more rigid and more invested in appearances, reacts with far greater difficulty. Around them, the extended family and the brothers' social world provide further pressure. A major story beat involves the couple's decision to remove themselves from that pressure, to leave Brazil and build a life together elsewhere, in Buenos Aires, where they can live without the constant scrutiny of family and neighbors. The film follows their attempt to make that life work: the tenderness of it, the isolation of it, and the pull of the family they left behind.

Throughout, Abranches resists melodrama. There are no villains, no scenes of violent rejection, no moralizing narrator. The film's style is polished and sensual, with lush photography, a romantic score, and an emphasis on skin, water, light, and intimacy, and it asks the audience to accept the brothers' love on its own terms rather than to judge it. That choice is the movie's signature and its most contested quality: viewers looking for a reckoning with consequences will find the film evasive, while viewers drawn to its sincerity will find it unusually tender. The story builds toward a climactic emotional confrontation over whether the brothers' bond can survive the claims of family, geography, and ordinary life, a resolution this synopsis deliberately withholds.[edit]