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Sisters [DVD]

Screenplay : Brian De Palma & Louisa Rose (story by Brian De Palma)

MPAA Rating : R

Year of Release : 1973

Stars : Margot Kidder (Danielle Breton), Jennifer Salt (Grace Collier), Charles Durning (Larch), William Finley (Emil Breton), Lisle Wilson (Philip Woode), Barnard Hughes (Mr. McLennen), Mary Davenport (Mrs. Collier), Dolph Sweet (Detective Kelly)

Sisters is Brian De Palma at his vicious, malicious best. An overt homage to Alfred Hitchcock, especially Psycho (1960), and made independently for less than half-a-million dollars, Sisters makes up in visual ingenuity what it lacks in budget. Shot mostly in tight, enclosed rooms, De Palma employs complex tracking shots, long zooms, fast-cut editing, and a now-famous use of precisely timed split-screen effects to weave his bloody mystery.

The story concerns Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder), a French-Canadian model living on Staten Island in New York City. She meets a man named Philip (Lisle Wilson) one night when they both star on a Candid Camera-style TV game show called Peeping Toms (in fact, De Palma starts the film within Peeping Toms, and it is only after a few minutes that we realize we are inside a TV show; it's a self-conscious trick that he would employ again at the beginning of 1981's Blow Out). Philip goes home with Danielle that night, and the next morning he is brutally murdered by Danielle's deranged twin sister, Dominique, who only a year earlier had been surgically separated from Danielle.

Then, in true Psycho fashion, after 40 minutes of identifying with Danielle, De Palma completely shifts the audience identification, placing it instead with Grace Collier (Jennifer Collier), a determined young newspaper columnist who witnesses Philip's murder from her apartment across the street. De Palma temporarily overlaps audience identification with Grace and Danielle with the use of the split screen. He tracks Grace calling and waiting for the police on the right sight of the screen, while he simultaneously tracks Danielle and her ex-husband, Emil (William Finley), as they dump Philip's body into the hide-a-bed couch and clean up the blood.

De Palma maintains the simultaneity of the two events down to the second with only minimal editing, so that we see from two angles as Grace and the police officers come up the elevator and Emil just manages to hide around a corner. As an audience member, it is a vexing and enthralling scenario because your identification is torn: Are you anxious that Grace and the police will not arrive in time to catch Danielle and Amil in the act, or are you anxious that Danielle and Amil will not get the crime scene cleaned up in time? It's suspense pulled two ways.

For most of the film's remainder, the identification rests squarely with Grace as she becomes determined to prove that Danielle (or Dominique, who is conspicuously absent all of a sudden) killed Philip. She gets no help from the police, especially Detective Kelly (Dolph Sweet), who is bitter about the columns Grace has written condemning police brutality (De Palma gives us a montage of Grace's headlines, one of which read "Why we call them pigs"). Despite a search of the apartment, they don't turn up any immediate evidence. De Palma's blackly comic sense of humor comes out best in these scenes, especially when Grace sits down on the couch, literally on top of the dead body, and proclaims in a frustrated tone, "That body is here somewhere!"

Sisters was the film that made De Palma a well-known director, and it was the first to stress the themes and obsessions that would drive his films throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, including Carrie (1976), Obsession (1976), The Fury (1978), and Dressed to Kill (1980). Voyeurism is a particularly recurrent thematic element in De Palma's work, and it is stressed repeatedly throughout Sisters. One scene in particular, in which Grace watches through binoculars while a private investigator (Charles Durning) searches Dominique's apartment, is directly inspired by Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954).

De Palma has freely admitted that he made Sisters as a kind of cinematic experiment, a way for him to hone his directorial skills after making fairly loosely plotted and staged underground films like Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970). There is nothing loose about Sisters in any sense. It as tightly plotted and tautly controlled by De Palma as any film he has ever made. It comes close to derailing in the last 20 minutes, when Grace and Danielle's stories once again merge and De Palma uses a series of bizarre, black-and-white, hypnotic dream sequences to explain Danielle and Dominique's twisted story and how Emil was involved in their separation (most of these scenes take place in an institution for the malformed, and the eerie quality brings to mind Todd Browning's Freaks). Yet, although he verges on the absurd, De Palma never tumbles over. He maintains control throughout.

Thus, Sisters remains, from start to finish, a consuming film. It is exhilarating, tense, often quite funny, sometimes all at the same time. De Palma's indebtedness to Hitchcock is obvious in just about every frame, as well as in his use of Hitch's favorite composer, Bernard Herrmann, whose thundering score, which is reminiscent of his work on Psycho and Vertigo (1958), gives Sisters an added edge.

One could accuse De Palma of being a knock-off, but he uses Hitch's methods and obsessions with such skill and aplomb that he makes them his own; the homage is there, yet Sisters is first and foremost the sign of an emerging talent coming into his own. No other director has come close to matching Hitchcock's adeptness at wielding tension and humor to, in Hitch's own words, "play the audience." Watching as De Palma slides deeper and deeper into slick, uninspired commercial vehicles like Mission to Mars (2000) makes one realize just how much his early films need to be treasured.

©2000 James Kendrick