Sister, by the Franco-Swiss director Ursula Meier
(Home), achieves its considerable effects at least partly
by misdirection. Set during the Christmas season, it offers up a
bitter irony in its French title, L’enfant d’en haut or
The Child from On High, which helps steer the more simple-minded
sort of movie-goer (and movie critic — see Manohla Dargis in the
New York Times, for example) towards seeing the movie
as a sort of political tract about that left-wingers’ favorite
subject, “income inequality.” But it’s not really about income
inequality at all, except insofar as such inequality betokens a
much greater, much more serious kind of inequality: the moral and
spiritual kind whose American counterpart has recently been
adumbrated by Charles Murray in his book, Coming
Apart.
Ms. Meier’s hero, 12-year-old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein), lives
in relative penury down in a Swiss valley with Louise (Léa
Seydoux), his slutty ne’er-do-well older sister. There are vague
and uncertain accounts of what happened to their parents. With the
help of a season pass, Simon daily ascends on high to the posh
ski-resorts above, in which god-like realm he steals and sells
expensive ski-equipment to support his and Louise’s hand-to-mouth
existence in the very different world below. To a certain kind of
mind, the very presence — on film, at least, since the actual
place would be read somewhat differently — of a playground for the
idle rich, particularly when there is a clearly-drawn contrast with
the less fortunate outside its boundaries, contains within its
splendidly visual luxury an entire political narrative that
scarcely needs spelling out. But beneath this obvious surface, Ms.
Meier is actually doing something rather different and more
interesting than illustrating why we ought to tax the rich.
For Simon, in spite of his larcenous career, is desperately
trying to impose a strangely familiar moral template on his chaotic
existence. Louise, who drifts from one menial job to another and
often disappears for days at a time with some new man, is the more
childish of the two and has come to depend on the money Simon
brings in from his black market dealings to keep their little
household intact. Simon willingly embraces the role of provider for
them both and, in fact, actively subverts Louise’s attempts either
to play a more responsible role herself or to bring an adult male
protector into their relationship as a more appropriate head of the
family, as she presumably sees it. Having assumed that role for
himself, Simon doesn’t want to give it up to a stranger. Nor does
he want Louise to break the bond of dependency he has established
between them. So long as she needs the money he brings in to their
cramped little apartment, so long will she have to trade for it the
only love he has ever known.
There is one heart-breaking scene in which he offers her every
penny of his ill-gotten gains in exchange for being allowed to lie
down beside her in bed and cuddle. The otherwise bovine Louise
understands well enough how the sexual economy works, even when
there is no “sex,” as we and the movies habitually understand the
term, involved. But there is a momentary consciousness, a distant
memory perhaps, of the way in which custom once made use of its
irreducible reality for socially more useful and emotionally more
satisfying purposes. A similar moment comes to Simon when a rich
Englishwoman (Gillian Anderson) mistakes him for another one of the
rich kids at the resort and one who might like to play with her
children. The awkward eagerness with which he tries on, as it were,
the role of child rather than that of premature paterfamilias is
equally touching.
Again and again he tries to imagine a way out of the grim
necessity of the difficult and degrading but better-than-nothing
life he has helped to make for himself and his sister out of
desperately unpromising materials, and again and again he is unable
to find the way. It’s almost as if the parody of the traditional
family that the two of them have created has the family’s own
gravitational pull on them — which to some extent it clearly does.
Ms. Meier’s eye, and that of her director of photography, Agnes
Godard, is therefore not so much on the gap between rich and poor
as on what it stands for in terms of social cohesion versus social
breakdown. I think she also sees how the moral force of traditional
relations between the sexes, and between parent and child, somehow
manages to reassert itself in even the most appallingly disordered
circumstances and is not just a luxury that only the rich can
afford.
