French Film Fest 2005---Me and My Sister

For those of you who love Isabelle Huppert playing Isabelle Huppert go watch the film. Everyone else wait for some of the other films that are soon going to come to the States with the other talented actors who acted in Me and My Sister (Catherine Frot & François Berléand) and skip this.

Alexandra Leclère has delivered a competent but unexceptional first film without jarring flaws and without anything remarkable. The dialogue gets a B- grade. The cast is so competent that it could have acted with closed eyes and probably did. I can’t imagine Huppert needing a single direction for the film since she has played the same role in each and every film for the past ten years or longer. In some of the other films (Piano Teacher, Merci pour le Chocolat), a lot more was demanded from her. In this one, the director seems happy to let Huppert, the angry, mean, jealous sister, get away with playing bad on medium heat. Frot’s role demands moments of overacting since she plays the small time provincial sister in Paris for a few days to meet with publishers who’ve shown interest in her novel. Despite our sympathies for Frot who is ridiculed by her sister every few minutes in the conversation, we’re unsure if Frot has anything much going for her till she shows up for her interview and we see her buzzing the door for Editions Grasset no less! Berléand is cartoonish as well at first. He’s shown first taking his wife (Huppert) against her will in bed. But he somehow seems to escape through the caricaturing instincts of the director and delivers a believable performance. Tired of the blind hatred Huppert is turning against her sister he tells her he’s been sleeping with a dead woman for ten years…that he could do…but he won’t be with a jealous woman which is what she’s become. When Huppert buckles in the kitchen and falls hurting her back, Berléand is tender, loving, yet firm in his opinion that she should apologize to her sister. Huppert doesn’t.

Leclère may yet make a good film in the future. The frustrating thing about Me and My Sister is that it plods along a rather predictable path all the way till the end. We can see what it could have been but isn’t. We see Huppert playing her archetypical role (someone please cast her as Mother Teresa or the world will forget she’s actually acting!) as soon as the film starts and nothing changes whatsoever in her acting or her character. She seems to pay lip service to the idea of getting a job (spurred by envy for her sister) but in the end not much comes of that. She finds out her best friend is sleeping with her husband and screams at the woman. Yet after the incident she remains unremittingly mean to her sister who is nice to her. There is a momentary deviation twice or thrice in the film when she asks if she was bad or says she hates herself but even that feels old and stale. An actress like Huppert, given the roles she chooses, needs a somewhat more complex psychological role to play. Me and My Sister can never decide if it wants to be wicked or funny or sweet or accessible and as a result simply ends up a little bland despite one sister hurling insult and injury in the direction of the other. In contrast Eros Thérapie with Frot and Berléand which should be coming here soon gives more satisfaction even though it isn’t seeringly ambitious. Watch out for it.

And oh! A special invitation to you Huppert fans out there who loved this film to comment on it on this blog.