Homelessness,
aimlessness, and a life of crime? Those things are not so fun. And yet because
of them, Sister, starring Kacey Mottet Klein, Léa Seydoux, and
Gillian Anderson (whose ridiculously delayed aging process has got me simultaneously
jealous and impressed), is uncommonly affecting. It’s a sad world out there for
countless kids, and Sister captures that quite well.
The
movie, directed and co-written by Ursula Meier, spends its time with 12-year-old
Simon (Klein), a scrawny, scrappy thief who lives in a scummy apartment under a
high-class ski resort. He looks up and sees the higher classes at their costly play;
what could be more crushing than that? So he collects money from the fellow
poor, bottom-of-the-hill kids every morning, takes the lift up to the top, and
steals basically anything he can get his hands on. He digs holes in the snow to
stash the skis he swipes. He stuffs goggles, gloves, and helmets into his
backpack or in his coat. And then his nights are spent cleaning up the stuff
and figuring out how to sell it, so he can make some quick cash.
Simon
isn’t totally alone, but he might as well be—because Louise (Seydoux), his
older sister, is kind of useless. Seemingly a few years older than Simon, with
a worn-down kind of beauty, Louise can’t seem to keep a job very long, bouncing
from gig to gig—just as she seems to bounce from guy to guy. None of them seem
to treat her very well, but she disappears for days on end regardless,
sometimes coming home with bruises or black eyes. So Simon buys all the food,
gives her a little money, and covets the red BMW owned by Louise’s new
boyfriend, a symbol of wealth and status in jarring contrast with their messy
apartment and mostly possession-less lives.
So
every day for Simon is pretty much the same: Go up to the slopes, steal some
stuff, come back down, sleep a little, stuff ears with the ends of cigarettes
to keep from hearing Louise having sex with her boyfriend, get up the next day,
do it all over again. But as much as Simon seems to be coasting by—even getting
a waiter at the ski resort to buy stolen items from him directly, providing a
more steady source of income—things start going wrong. His relationship with
Louise seems to be unraveling. His infatuation with the rich resort attendee
Kristin (Anderson), who has two sons about his own age, doesn’t seem like the
healthiest thing. And, worst of all, he starts catching the attention of his
marks, and they begin noticing when he swipes things. Without being able to
steal, who is Simon? Does the boy have an identity outside of being a thief?
What
Meier does exceptionally well is create characters whom are simultaneously sympathetic
and kind of detestable, and as a result feel more real than you would expect. Klein
effectively captures the resentment, pain, and defensiveness bristling in Simon,
a kid who seems to have the right kind of intentions in protecting Louise but
clearly isn’t going about it the right way. And Seydoux uses her fragile beauty
as an advantage here, veering between her dual identities as a
responsibility-rejecting mess and someone struggling to make her life better. Bad
choices and incorrect decisions abound, but it’s not hard to see why Simon and
Louise make them. Few other opportunities exist.
Aside
from the strong performances, there’s beautiful, saddening cinematography,
too—as Simon goes up the lift into another world, then down again into his
personal kind of hell—and a significant sense of realism. The movie dips
briefly into some clichéd material with an emotional reveal around the middle
of the narrative, but rebounds nicely with some unsettling displays of power.
Simon may have all the cash in comparison with Louise at the bottom of the
hill, but he’s on the lower rungs of the food chain when he goes up to the ski
resort, a place he can never belong. Those haunting images of him riding that
lift, the sense that we’re watching a life that can never escape its own
meaninglessness, are what will stay with you after Sister.
