Sister

Synopsis: Simon (Kasey Mottet Klein) lives with his much-older sister, Louise (Léa Seydoux), in a housing commission apartment below the slopes of a luxury ski resort. Louise is irresponsible, constantly losing jobs, disappearing with men, and neglecting Simon. The boy takes on the role of family provider by visiting the resort and stealing equipment.

Ursula Meier’s film is reminiscent of realist offerings from the likes of the Dardenne brothers such as Rosetta and L’ Enfant  – methodical, intense and sometimes painful to watch because of the disturbing nature of the subject matter. Sister however has more dramatic immediacy: there is little to explain how Louise and Simon got in the situation in which they find themselves. They simply exist from day to day and from hand to mouth. The two worlds linked by the cable car are diametrically opposed – the bleak grey public housing ghetto where the siblings live is in stark contrast to the glitzy world of wealthy holiday-goers. All the scenes atop the mountain have a blindingly snowy white sheen whilst life below is grey and drab.

As the ski world is populated with seasonal workers so is Simon’s young life almost that of a worker, albeit a criminal one. He has his locker atop the hill stacked with tools in order to transform himself from a poor kid to one privileged, a passage symbolized by his ride up the hill in the cable car. His modus operandi is carefully thought out as he grabs equipment then buries it until he can safely get it down to ground level and sell it off from the side of the road or to people in sporting clubs. When he meets a wealthy English holiday-maker (Gillian Anderson) he has his story at the ready, a story which gets him a free lunch. In his imagination, he is one of the “beautiful people”, with wealthy parents; at other times he is the mini-gangster even training much younger apprentices in his thieving art. Whilst on one level reprehensible, you sort of admire his entrepreneurial know-how.  It is only when Simon teams up with a seasonal worker from the ski-resort’s restaurant (Martin Compston) that things start to go awry.

By contrast Louise is a real loser. Life seems to have done her wrong (we don’t find out why until near the end), and she is content to let the little thief provide for her, ask him for money, almost as if he is her Daddy, and to go AWOL for days with various men. Her abrogation of her sororal duty is shameful.

It would be easy to dislike Simon but there is something fragile and needy about him. We see him looking longingly from a distance at the small intimacies of others people’s lives. In one heartbreaking scene he tries to buy Louise’s affection  and in another he shows the depth of his caring and compassion for his sister.

The film won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival 2012, and both leads have nominations for their fine performances. The chemistry between them is compelling, but it is the wonderfully-unexpected turn of the plot that really brings the emotion to the fore in the film’s later section. I found this an appealingly softening quality as at times in the earlier scenes there is a sense of emotional distance.

As with many films of the realist school, Sister takes a slow and measured approach: nothing is overly dramatic or played for sensation but rather the film relies on the slow-burn effect of gradually revealing the true state of the world for these sad characters, leaving us an ending that is ambiguous, but tinged with hope.  

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