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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In Which We Charm Absolutely No One

Notes on Margaret

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

Margaret
dir. Kenneth Lonergan
150 minutes

Kenneth Lonergan’s hold on the countless ways we fail to communicate is Margaret’s most bewitching coup. Rather than gaining mileage from what is unsaid, his teenage protagonist, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) clashes with each person in her ever-growing sphere as she tries to reconcile with a fatal bus accident in which she feels partly responsible.

Discovery, as Lonergan lays bare, is often achieved with fight. Shushing, shouting, crying, dismissive arm-waving, passively listening, correcting someone’s grammar, mimicking, misunderstandings, storming out and slamming doors, all inch Lisa further from resolve but closer to breaking through her childhood safeties and habitat, the Upper West Side — a character unto itself in Margaret.

Anna Paquin is terrific as a teenage girl. She struts to her desk. She pouts. She still has baby fat. Her skirt is too short and her henley shirts, too tight, but with stretched sleeves to pull over her hands in more contemplative, panicked moments. Her hair is greasy at the roots. Her eyeliner, reapplied regularly. Her eyebrows are over plucked and her stare is restless no matter the emotion — eagerness turned frustration, grief turned anger. Her attitude thaws with adults who outdo her wit or minutes before she loses her virginity.

On screen, teenage rebellion is charming. But not Lisa Cohen’s. Hers is not easy to look at — it overcompensates, it’s at times ugly and a bit ridiculous. It’s authentic. For years on screen, Kirsten Dunst sought to be Lisa Cohen.

In one scene she wanders drunkenly around a party, stumbling from a boy named Paul to another boy named Darren. She is bold and willing with Paul in the bathroom but it’s the way her body flops down on the floor in the hallway to make-out with Darren, only to struggle as she gets up, that is exact.

Lisa Cohen is both the heroine in a 19^th century novel and a character from a post 9/11 graphic novel.

Margaret is cut somewhat messily; some jumps are more abrasive than others. In this way, everyone’s story is told alongside Lisa’s. Everyone is defenceless, including the audience.

She dismisses a boy’s phone call and we are immediately dropped in his bedroom where he sits on the edge of his bed, crying beside his Pavement poster.

A conference call with lawyers and loved ones, and Lisa, contrasts with three New York buildings — Lisa’s urgency calmed momentarily, not by a parent or a friend, but by her city.

“What’s Indiana like?” Lisa inches in to ask her teacher. They are sitting on the couch in his sublet. Seconds later the camera cuts away, and in the next scene, she stands at his front door as he apologizes for what just happened.   

Like Maurice Pialat in A Nos Amours, who too directs and plays the father of a teenage daughter, Lonergan is Karl, Lisa’s dad who lives in California, remarried. Shots of Karl pacing outside his beachside house as he speaks somewhat idly to his daughter, contrast with her relentlessly shifting world. His sky is blue and empty while wide shots of Lisa walking home after school are peopled and hectic — a huddle of boys part as she digs her hands in her skirt pockets and passes them, bothered by the unwanted attention.

Margaret slows in parts to truly appraise emotions. Instead of dialogue as a tool used to forward plot, it rationalizes a character’s feelings. Lisa’s mother, Joan (J. Smith-Cameron) is dating a man named Ramon played by Jean Reno. One night she asks Lisa’s opinion about a date outfit. Their exchange is immediately cruel and spirals as if on each side, the breaks have jammed. But neither is in fact mad. Both are hurting and experiencing the kind of homelessness only possible in one’s own home, at the end of a week that crawled with failed attempts. A mother readying herself for a date is no match for a daughter afflicted with misunderstood angst.

Lonergan’s long takes ripen as Lisa’s emotions, no matter how sincere, heighten. It’s as if something on screen thickens, like batter, when the camera sticks with a conversation that at first appears to have no direction. It’s exhilarating. 

At an outside terrace, Paquin, Jeannie Berlin, who plays a dear friend of the deceased, and a lawyer meet for lunch. They discuss legal options. Lisa interrupts a number of times. Salads are served. It brought to mind a scene in Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours where three adult children, mourning the loss of their mother, discuss her will and the family’s summer home. They speak diagnostically much like in Margaret where emotions turn to equation. In both films, unglamorous details are entirely involving. 

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She last wrote in these pages about the city of Los Angeles. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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