Short Take: Sisters

Brian De Palma’s 1972 film Sisters, starring Margot Kidder, is no longer a film that can be watched on its own terms. One can’t help but consider it relative to De Palma and Kidder’s other work. The picture is a horror thriller built around the mystery surrounding two separated Siamese twins (both played by Kidder) and the murder one of them commits. For De Palma, the film (like his subsequent Phantom of the Paradise) functions as a bridge between the cultural satire he was initially known for, and the thriller-suspense material that now defines his reputation. He’s at his best here with the cultural satire, specifically the lampoon of the Candid Camera TV show the film opens with. The thriller material is largely reworkings of elements from Alfred Hitchcock films—clever but ultimately empty. De Palma highlights the absurdities, but doesn’t go much beyond that. He has yet to develop the incisiveness with which he would investigate these tropes in his later efforts. He does provide the thrills, but the grisliness aside, it’s in a bare-bones, 1970s action-TV-series manner. Anyone expecting the gorgeous staging and camerawork that are the most admirable hallmarks of his mature style will be sorely disappointed. (He was still learning. Reportedly an extended tracking-shot treatment of a police apartment search was heavily reworked in the editing room because the footage looked too awkward.) Other steps toward the filmmaking style he developed, such as the use of split-screen, aren’t very deft. He was still learning his way with the actors, too. The dialogue scenes have a rather stilted quality. Margot Kidder is impressive, though. As the sister who’s center-stage, she speaks with a Quebecois accent, and is a warm, emotionally fluid presence. It’s a pleasant contrast to the brittle, anxious Lois Lane that defined her career in the Christopher Reeve Superman pictures. The best aspect of her work here is her ability to reconcile this softer manner with the violence a sister commits. The cast also includes Jennifer Salt as a ninny newspaper reporter, Lisle Wilson as the murder victim, and Charles Durning as a comic private detective. (The movie's final shot, featuring Durning, is a piece of surreal-absurdist tableaux that ranks with the best of Luis Buñuel.) The script is credited to De Palma and Louisa Rose. Bernard Herrmann’s musical score is a fine addition to the library of work he put together with Hitchcock and other filmmakers.