In Which This Must Not Be The Place

Panic Room

by KARA VANDERBIJL

The One I Love
director Charlie McDowell
91 minutes

Every relationship has its house rules: put the toilet lid down, don't cheat, listen to what I have to say before telling me what I should do. But Ethan (Mark Duplass) has broken the big one, so he and Sophie (Elisabeth Moss) visit a therapist to see if they can salvage their marriage.

Call me when you get there, don't make fun of me in front of your friends, make yourself more emotionally available.

Ethan and Sophie try so hard it's painful to watch. Attempting to recapture the magic of their early courtship, they break into a stranger's yard in the wee hours and jump into the pool, failing to understand that what thrilled them early on wasn't the act itself but performing it with someone attractive they didn't yet know.

When his initial methods fail, the therapist suggests a new approach: the couple should escape for the weekend to a remote retreat, a huge, beautiful house on lush grounds complete with a guest cottage.

Pick up your socks, pick up some milk, will you, honey can you pick up some beer?

Taking a trip: like telling the truth or trying a new hobby, it's one of the great relationship rejuvenators that can also double as a death knell. At first, Ethan and Sophie bask in the opulence of their getaway: they poke their head in magazine-perfect rooms, begin to laugh, explore the guest house, open a bottle of wine. The film's mood — earlier dominated by discord, deep shadows, and disconnected dialogue — lightens. Ethan fires up a joint and they pass it back and forth. Somebody, we sense, is about to get lucky.

And somebody does. But in the morning, Ethan has no memory of their encounter.

We immediately cry “Drugs!”, of course, but McDowell's film takes a refreshing turn for the weird and ends up revealing more about the rules within a relationship than another rote story about a difficult relationship could.

Slowly, Ethan and Sophie realize that they're not alone at their retreat — in fact, another Ethan and Sophie live in the guest house, which only one of them can enter at a time. Mostly identical, these doppelgangers embody aspects of Ethan and Sophie's personalities that have fallen by the wayside the longer they've been together. Sophie becomes enamored with faux Ethan, while real Ethan's suspicions grow and fake Sophie cooks bacon.

In every relationship, an (unconsciously) agreed-upon dynamic guides the couple's interactions, and the longer the relationship lasts, the more this dynamic cements and resists change. Ethan and Sophie remember the wildness of their early days because these rules didn't yet exist: they “did Ecstasy at Lollapalooza” and jumped into strangers' pools. Ironically, of course, the very freedom to be wild and oneself at the beginning of a relationship is what determines one's role in the relationship later on, a role that's very difficult to break out of — unless, of course, you meet someone new.

Ethan cheated on Sophie — it's the whole reason they're in therapy, after all — and now Sophie cheats on Ethan with his shadow, a foil that apologizes for all the wrong he's ever done and wants to be as close to her as possible. This allows Sophie to see herself as a generous and forgiving spouse, which, ironically, fake Sophie also embodies — the doppelganger is so accommodating and domestic she's basically a transplant from the 1950s.

Moss and Duplass deftly impersonate both the classically boring, married couple that dresses in neutral tones and goes for jogs around the property, as well as the doppelganger duo. It's especially easy to imagine Moss as a blonde and icy cool Hitchcock heroine, which adds even more interest to her character as the film dives deeper into fantasy.

McDowell doesn't draw any conclusions, and by the end it's hard to tell the difference between what's real and what's false. Ultimately, the film's greatest success lies in the subtle suggestion that Ethan and Sophie were in fact in a better place at the beginning of the film than at the end. It's better to build a safe atmosphere in which to be uncomfortable with your partner, than one that is comfortable but unsafe.

Kara VanderBijl is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about Outlander. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can subscribe to her letters here.

In Which We Look Back Or Look Out

Lumpy & Fuzzy

by SARAH LABRIE

Your Sister's Sister
dir. Lynn Shelton
90 minutes

Lynn Shelton makes slow, imperfect dramatic comedies about people melting into their late thirties. She shoots in and near Seattle, tinting her images with the washed out grays and taupes of a rainy day at the beach. Dialogue drifts from moment to moment, reflecting her characters’ ambivalent drift towards adulthood. Her actors are youngish but not young, jaded, but not old enough yet to be resigned.

In her second feature, 2009's Humpday, Joshua Leonard and Mark Duplass play former college best friends who haven’t spoken for a while. Andrew (Leonard) has been traveling through Mexico making dubious-sounding art, while Ben (Duplass) picked up a real job, a wife and a house. Andrew shows up unannounced one night and invites Ben to a party at a commune. There, drunk and goaded on by a pair of charismatic lesbians, he dares Ben to make a gay porn for a film festival. Both men are straight and their intentions are oddly pure — Andrew’s not attracted to Ben; he only wants proof that his old friend is still cool. Ben, meanwhile, wants to find out if, underneath the mortgage and the marriage, this is even true.

This is a ridiculous premise, but onscreen it works. Shelton directed from a ten-page outline, giving Ben (Mark Duplass) and Leonard (Joshua Leonard) free reign to make up a narrative as they went. In the year of the rise of Judd Apatow, I don’t think anybody expected 2009’s most emotionally honest buddy comedy to be directed by a woman. The movie was a surprise hit, taking home a Special Jury Prize at Sundance, and winning Shelton a spot in the indie firmament next to Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation, Funny Ha-Ha), Joe Swanberg (Nights and Weekends) and Duplass (The Puffy Chair). Those directors made careers off messy movies about twenty-somethings at a loss — Shelton’s film picked up where they left off, when the aimless years were winding down, but a purpose still hadn’t been found.

Watching it for the first time three years ago, I couldn’t help but wonder what the same story would look like if Andrew and Ben were women. So when I heard about Shelton’s latest, Your Sister’s Sister, I was intrigued. I never jumped on the Bridesmaids train, and I wanted to see if she — if anyone? — could make a movie that proved women in their thirties could be listless and creative and insecure in a funny, meaningful, narrative-sustaining way.

Still, the poster gave me pause. Humpday fetishized Duplass and Leonard’s matching lumpy, fuzzy stomachs. The one-sheet for Your Sister’s Sister highlighted Emily Blunt’s feline grace and Rosemarie DeWitt’s porcelain jaw. Iris (Blunt) is meant to be secretly in love with her best friend Jack (Duplass), but next to Blunt, with her famous-person skin and perfect teeth, Duplass looks like a baked potato. I had a sneaking suspicion (confirmed) that no one was going to take the opportunity to address this disparity.

Shot on the San Juan Islands off the coast of Seattle, the movie itself is beautiful, the camera lingering on fog over lakes and black trees against a navy sky. The story here has the same blue undertones as Humpday, but the narrative is tighter and twistier, the pacing more artful. Jack’s brother died recently and Jack is listing into alcoholic depression. Iris sends him off to recover at her father’s empty house on Puget Sound. Jack shows up to find her half-sister, Hannah, already there, self-medicating after a breakup. They have drunken, disappointing sex. The next day, Iris arrives for a surprise visit, and a quiet little chaos ensues.

Blunt is appropriately chirpy and adorable as the favored younger sibling. Dewitt is compelling as the alternately abrasive and affectionate older daughter. The sisters bicker and make up, bicker and make up—Iris slips butter into vegan Hannah’s mashed potatoes, Hannah retaliates by telling embarassing stories about Iris’ pubic hair. For a while, you worry this is as high as the stakes are going to get. And then, suddenly, things swivel in a darker direction. The plot turns soap opera thick, with formulaic intrigues — Jack is also secretly in love with Iris! Hannah is a lesbian who was using Jack to have a baby! — and an empty payoff of a finale. In the penultimate scene, everybody gets what they want and nobody gets hurt. It’s hard not to feel like Shelton rushed things, worried she was going to run out the clock on her audience’s attention.

This is a shame. Shelton’s movies deal with people living through the age when hours become precious and wasting them starts to feel criminal. It’s around thirty that decisions turn irreversible and life ceases to feel infinite. In the years leading up to this age, it becomes more and more difficult to make any decisions at all. While Humpday’s meandering direction reflected this, Sister feels rushed and nervous, unwilling to probe that kind of stultifying darkness.

Your Sister's Sister also takes place in a contextless universe, free of politics, economic reality and people who aren’t middle class and white. It’s a little bit unfair to fault Shelton for something most other American indies are also guilty of, but this flaw is reflective of a larger issue. Shelton shot her third feature on a microscopic budget, the cast improvising the story from scene to scene. Without the constraints of studio notes and debt, they were free. Here was a chance to make a movie that didn’t look like other movies — the way Humpday was a buddy comedy that subverted the genre even as it raised the bar. Instead Your Sister’s Sister is a sweet romantic comedy perfect for watching on airplanes.

Time drifts along. Adulthood creeps up on all of us, whether we notice it or not. When it comes, it’s not always in a shape we recognize, and it’s never as tidy as we thought it would be. While this makes for a frustrating emotional reality, it could make for a really fascinating movie about two sisters. It’s too bad Shelton wasn’t brave enough to make it.  

Sarah LaBrie is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about Damsels in Distress. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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