Sister Sister (1987)

2 Responses to Sister Sister (1987)

1. Harlan says:

   May 20, 2023 at 7:26 am

   Commentary tracks often make these or any movies more interesting. This is one such case. Bill Condon talking about his first feature, how he was very happy about it until it was clear that it was not written and shot in a way effective for an audience, what’s “wrong” with it and why critics and audience alike disliked it.

   Enter commentary track #2 with White Australian woman Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, raging against idiot critics not understanding this Southern Gothic film. She does, and she brings her bookcase of academic literature to prove it.

   The “toxicity” of the psycho-social situation in the estate in which the action unfolds stems from the family’s ancestors having been White slave owners keeping Afro-American slaves 150 years ago:
   ”There’s a toxicity that’s implied in this world, it’s very subtle, but I think it’s where much of this toxicity comes from, right?, and the film places a huge, this heavy significant trust in the audience to pick that up, I think, I think that’s what’s going on, I’m not sure, there are different ways of reading this, I guess, and I certainly won’t try to push your opinion one way or another, but there’s certainly no denial that this movie is about White people….I’m a White Australian and we [sic] have our own murky history when it comes to violence, race, oppression, questions of visibility, and representation, so you know, I have my own problems to deal with. But the invisibility of Black people in the history of slavery and racism is pretty complicated, I think, in this film.”
   Never mind that, as Condo says, Cohen brought in a group of characters he himself called ”The Jews from Hell” (these are funny but annoying characters in the film); no, it’s not the presence of other minorities that make the film an uneasy watch, it’s the absence of them, the absence of Black people, ”just as Black people have been historically invisible to the sisters’ family”, as Heller-Nicholas puts it. The Jews in the film are not even worthy of a word from Heller-Nicholas.
   So the madness and trauma of the White sisters are based on old racist treatment of POCs: The interiors of the estate were shot in a Bayou sugar cane Plantation House on Bayou Lafourche, she says. This permeates the whole underlying terror of the film.
   The film is also very psycho-expressionistic, and the imagery of Lucy’s dreams, fantasies and perceptions are deeply rooted in Jungian “truths” about archetypes, which shows how well-versed the first time movie-maker was in psychoanalysis, gestalt psychology and psychodrama.
   The fresh Jesuit director and his talented Jewish writer Joel Cohen were evidently already in the 80s very knowledgeable in critical race theory, gender theory and misogyny, and put their deep understanding of these issues into a film project which at first did not appeal to Condo: ”What? Another slasher movie? They’re thirteen a dozen now! Isn’t the market kind of saturated?” but he had been waiting for three years to make a movie and was frustrated and desperate, so he made, eager to get to make something. What an amazing transformation of something mediocre into a Southern Gothic masterpiece!
   I really suggest everybody interested in film analysis and/or interpretation gets herself a copy of this edition, to get a fine example of how to NOT ”analyse” a film. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is obviously an intelligent and knowledgeable author, but such people are often keen to over-interpret movies according with their fields of interest, and she completely re-writes this film in her own head and makes of it something that it never was or could be. And that’s stupid.

   Reply
2. rarelust says:

   March 10, 2022 at 10:19 pm

   upgraded

   Reply