Sisters

You've got to love Brian De Palma. His movies violate nearly every conventional "rule" for cinema. They are obsessed with perverse sexuality and include gratuitous nudity. Often, their plots are directly lifted from old movies, particularly Hitchcock movies. He likes to kill off main characters less than halfway through his films, and even the characters that live tend not to be very likable. And, most famouly, almost all of them are gruesomely violent. His 1973 film Sisters is no exception, as De Palma elevates a B-level erotic thriller material into a modern classic of suspense.

Brian's bag has always been the pursuit of what he calls "a pure cinema." That is, storytelling at its most rudimentary form, using the camera, mise-en-scene, music and performance to manipulate an audience's emotions. His movies have never been about plot or dialogue, and to relate the plot of a De Palma movie is almost to miss the point right from the beginning. But this is a review, so I'll follow the format. Sisters relates the story of the Blanchion sisters, Siamese twins who were separated years before the story takes place. Now, one of the sister's, Danielle (Margot Kidder), works as a model and actress for a hidden camera TV show ("Peeping Tom"), while the other lives in a mental hospital.

The film follows Danielle and a male suitor until he's murdered in her apartment, and then perspective shifts (in a brilliant split-screen sequence) to her neighbor, a snoopy journalist named Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt). The shift in perspectives, lifted structurally from Hitchcock's Psycho, serves a purpose beyond allusion. It catches us off guard, removing us from the story. Thematically, it makes sense, as we've come to trust Danielle and now must be reminded that she hides some sort of horrible secret that will drive the action of the rest of the film. In a film obsessed with voyeurism, it alerts the viewer that not everything we see can be trusted, that the camera (our substitute in the world of the film) contains no more fidelity than do our eyes in regular life. We're set up to think of Sisters, right from the title, as a film about an evil twins, and suddenly, it's a film about a nosy reporter and her private detective associate (ably played by Charles Durning).

I'll avoid speaking on the remainder of the plot, as I do want there to be some surprises for you should you rent the movie. If you've seen Hitchcock films previously (or, failing that, other DePalma films riffing on Hitchcock, like Dressed to Kill or Body Double), the switcheroos may not be shocking any more, but they're certainly provocative enough to hold interest.

Psycho isn't the only Hitch film De Palma riffs on here. Rear Window provides the other obvious touchpoint, as so much of the action relies on one character observing another from afar. Danielle is stalked by her mysterious ex-husband Emil (De Palma regular William Finley), the murder is witnessed by Grace from the window of her apartment, even we, the viewers, are constantly reminded of our place in the story as observers. De Palma constantly places his camera outside a window or a doorway, looking in on the action of a scene. Even the "Candid Camera"-type show upon which Danielle appears plays with the voyeur impulse, placing men in various situations to determine whether or not they will spy on a woman undressing.

This, of course, links up with the basic conception of Siamese twins. Part of the horror that must have attracted De Palma to the story of conjoined twins is the lack of privacy or personal space. These are two people who cannot have their own lives, who cannot ever be free of their sibling. During a twisted dream sequence late in the film, Danielle has a flashback to her initial courtship with Emil, making out with him while her twin sister Dominique looked on awkwardly. "You're supposed to be asleep," Danielle hisses.

And his film puts the audience in this very same dilemma, looking on into the personal lives and deaths of his characters, knowing that we should not be seeing these twisted stories played out for our entertainment, yet unable to look away.

Most of the success of the film can be attributed to the remarkable cinematography and direction that would become a De Palma signature throughout the rest of the 70's. From the split-screen murder sequence to the extended riff on Rope, in which Danielle and Emil hide a body from two detectives inside a futon, to the German Expressionism-inspired dream sequence that ties the story together, Sisters remains memorable because of its graceful, shocking and inspired imagery, and the expert timing and editing that holds it all together. This was De Palma's first foray into Hitchcock territory, and more great films in this vein would follow, such as Obsession, Dressed to Kill and 2002's shamefully overlooked Femme Fatale, his best film in at least a decade.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention the wonderful score, done by frequent Hitch collaborate Bernard Hermann. This maybe isn't his best work, but it's a nice counterpoint to the darkly bizarre action of the film. At times, it's eerily reminiscent of Psycho, but like the movie as a whole, it stands apart as its own entity nicely. A fine compliment to a great movie.