367 - Sisters, United States, 1972. Dir. Brian De Palma.

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

367 - Sisters, United States, 1972.  Dir. Brian De Palma.

Philip Woode enters a locker room.  He turns around.  A woman enters.  She does not see him.  She begins to undress.  What should he do?  What will he do?  Will he watch?

He turns his back to her and looks the other way.

It turns out he was punked.  Set up on a hidden camera show.  Like Candid Camera.  Or Punked.  Or Girls Behaving Badly.  Only this one is called Peeping Tom.  People are put into situations without their knowledge where they may be tempted to spy on others.  It is recorded.  Then it is shown to a studio audience.  Contestants guess which action the person will take.  Then they watch the ending to see if they guessed correctly.  On this episode both contestants, one man and one woman, guess that he will watch the woman undress.  He does not.  He is gentleman.  Both contestants are wrong and win nothing.

Philip, however, does win something.  So does the woman.

The host brings them both out to the stage--Philip and the woman who was in on the joke, the aspiring model Danielle Breton, played by Margot Kidder.  Danielle wins a knife set.  Philip wins tickets for two to The African Room, a night club.

They leave with their gifts.  Danielle likes Philip.  She tells him.  She offers to go with him to the club.  They go that night.  Straight from the game show.  They enjoy each other.  Have a good time.

Until some creepy man shows up.  It is her husband.  Ugh.  No, wait!  He is not her husband anymore.  He is her ex-husband.  He is harassing her.  She tells him to leave her alone.  He refuses to do so.  He causes a scene.  Security arrives.  Philip stands up to him.  They removes him.  Philip and Danielle return to their date.

But on the way back to her house, they realize her ex is still hovering.  Following them.  Watching.  Philip goes to some trouble to pretend he is leaving.  Driving off.  Going around the block.  Re-entering the Alexander Hamilton apartments through the back entrance.  He shakes him.  For now.

They spend the night on the pull-out couch.  The next morning she goes into the bathroom to take her pills.  She is interrupted by another voice from the other room.  Her sister?  In the bedroom?  He goes to get dressed.  He knocks two red pills down the sink drain without seeing them.  He overhears the women.  The other woman does not seem to approve of Danielle's behavior.  Danielle returns.  She tells him.  She is a twin.  Today is their birthday.

She sees that she is out of pills.  He offers to run to the drugstore to get her some more.  While he is out he stops at a bakery to get her a cake.  They write on it.  "Happy Birthday, Dominique and Danielle."

When he returns, well, let us just say that he returns to a woman that has not had her pills.  She lies asleep on the pull-out couch.  He puts candles on the cake and lights them.  He takes one of the knives from the new cutlery set she won on the game show yesterday.  He enters the living room to surprise her with the cake, to have her blow out the candles, and to cut the cake.

He does not notice that her hair has changed.  That her face has changed.  He awakens her.

And that starts everything.

What happens next is seen by the newspaper editorial columnist looking out her window from across the way.  Grace Collier.  When she sees it, immediately she places a phone call and runs over to the apartment.

Grace meets the police at the lobby door.  They realize who made the phone call.  A woman who writes articles that ridicule them.  Calling them pigs.  She mocks them in print but calls them when she needs help.  And they come running.

Whatever happened up there in that apartment is no longer visible.  The police talk to Danielle.  They see nothing.  They question Grace's sanity.

They will not be the last people to question it.

And now the drama begins.

Brian De Palma launches his career with this film.  He made seven short films and six features before this one, but here he finds his voice.  The stylish, lush production design.  The tightly scripted and precisely choreographed action.  The melodramatic situations and heightened acting.  The thriller genre tropes.  The dramatic score.  An interest in how people look and what they see.

And split screens.

The action on the left occurs during the action on the right, but they are shown from different cameras in different locations.  Juicy.

Imagine an apartment set up like Alfred Hickcock's Rope (1948), where the camera can roam through every room in one long unbroken take.

Now imagine an apartment across the street, as in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), where someone with a camera or binoculars can look out the window and watch through our window everything that goes on, including a possible.

Then imagine a narrative structure where ordinary things happen before suddenly, without anticipation, there is a murder by multiple stabbings with a knife, as in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), followed by a clinical cleaning of the room, and resulting in the transition from one protagonist to another, with the revelation that the nice person and the murderer were actually the same person shifting back and forth between two personalities.

Now top it off with a score composed by Hitchcock's composer himself, Bernard Herrmann.

I wonder if Brian De Palma likes Alfred Hitchcock.

Sisters is his first film where he openly displays his affection for Hitchcock, with visual and technical precision.  De Palma tells us that he won science fairs and began college as a physics major.  We will see that personality played out tomorrow in a character possibly drawn partially from De Palma's youth, Peter Miller in Dressed To Kill (1980).

But De Palma does more than pay homage to Hitch, and the influence of other directors is clearly on display as well, such as Polanski's use of psychological breakdown in the claustrophobia of confined spaces--a la Knife in the Water (1962) (with boat as apartment), Repulsion (1965), and of course Rosemary's Baby (1968) (all of which we have seen).

De Palma also references Michael Powell's post-Pressburger film Peeping Tom (1960), which we watched earlier last year.  The game show that begins this film is called Peeping Tom.

De Palma did not have the money to do everything he wanted here.  He did construct the apartment so that he could film in it like Rope, and he constructed a special effect where he could repeatedly return to the couch to show increasing evidence of blood, but he could not get the camera to jib low enough or high enough to pull off the feat.

We have seen several instances of doppelgangers this year.

And personalities switching.

In Chinatown, it is "my sister, my daughter."

In Psycho, it is "my mother, myself."

In Sisters, it is "my sister, myself," when it comes to personality.

But then another layer lands.

It becomes "my neighbor, myself," when it comes to body.

Apparently it takes two women each to become two woman, each sharing the other half with a third woman.

Are you confused?

Make sure you remember to take your medicine.

And stay away from that ex-husband.

He is not who he seems.

But then, neither are you.