***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, Lisle Wilson, Bernard Hughes, and Bill Finley.
Directed by Brian De Palma & written by De Palma and Louisa Rose
1973
93 min R
So you want a good guilty pleasure? How about this slam-o early work from the gleefully magnificent Brian De Palma? You get a madhouse, multiple stab wounds, a corpse stuffed in a sofa, conjoined twins (lookalike women in their purest form?), sex punished by death, an unwed career woman being mistaken for a maniac, and plenty of allusions to “Psycho.” Hitchcockian classicism is combined with trashy B-movie fun: the blood is bright and fake and the original advertisements loudly declared that there will be a “shock recovery period” after each screening. The movie even features an ominous score by Hitchcock’s favorite, Bernard Hermann.
And it’s no accident that the career woman who declares “I’m never going to marry” has to match wits with the professional model—the template of men’s fantasies—who declares “I’m no women’s libber.” Did I mention the career woman has a repressive mother and the model is “coincidentally” an orphan?
“Sisters” opens with the same trick De Palma later uses in “Blow Out:” we begin with what we think is the movie proper, only to find out that it’s a TV show about peeping toms, except no TV show is directed this well. In “Blow Out” it was a cut-rate slasher film, except with De Palma direction.
The movie’s best sequence involves the mad hunchback doctor (Bill Finley) dragging the nosy Nancy Drew reporter (Jennifer Salt) through a lengthy, surreal flashback—but the reporter is in the place of the dead girl every step of the way, just as characters in a film are often our vicarious stand-ins. Margot Kidder is creepy as both twins, and De Palma takes his usual delight in the nature of point-of-view and cinema. As the movie jumps from person-to-person, we constantly ask, through whose eyes are we seeing this? Who knows which facts? Why are we getting to see subtitles even though we’re watching a man who doesn’t speak French? Do we have a stand-in at all in this scene, or are we the eye of God?
De Palma’s central ambivalence is to invite us to watch what we’re not supposed to see, then the watchers are punished; our curiosity about freaks and the macabre is at once satisfied and condemned. Anyway, the delusions, schizophrenia, and murder are probably the stuff that makes real psychiatrists hate the movies, but who cares? “Sisters” is the meticulous, precise styling of “Femme Fatale,” “Dressed to Kill,” and “Blow Out” in its embryonic state. Pun intended.
The DVD is available from the always reliable Criterion Collection, which has replaced the boring “making-of” featurette (many of which are just glorified trailers) with a genuinely interesting text-only interview with our man Brian. There is, of course, a sort of film-school laziness in being a fan of De Palma’s: all movies, to quote Roger Ebert, are never about “what” they are about, but are about “how” they are about it, and De Palma is so obvious in his love of the “how.”
Finished Friday, July 8th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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