Give Me Your Hand

Pascal-Alex Vincent’s debut follows a pair of teenage twins (Alexandre and Victor Carril) as they improvise their way from their father’s bakery in France towards Spain and the funeral of a mother they never knew. There’s train-hopping, working in the fields, running away, fights with each other and sex with strangers; the boys make convincing lust objects for a variety of figures. You might think of ‘Y Tu Mamá También’ or ‘Drôle de Felix’ or ‘Two Lane Blacktop’ or even ‘Days of Heaven’. Vincent shows a confident reticence: there’s not much dialogue but a lot of travelling shots and play with mobility and stasis. Plenty of work is done by the ambient score and rapport between the Carril brothers – an unarticulated, sometimes animalistic co-dependence that easily swings between play, violence and support and is expressed surprisingly well in a wordless anime prologue whose feel, both simple and complex, joyful and dark, is an apt introduction.