July 2: Your Sister's Sister (2012 -- Lynn Sheldon)

★★★★★

I think this little film is about as good as a nano-budget movie can be.  Maybe it’s still mumblecore, but there is a very tight plot here with clear goals in every scene.  Every character follows an arc, both an individual one and one related to the other two characters, and Your Sister’s Sister flows with the vigor, complexity and surprise of a well-done Restoration play.  And this all works because the actors involve us with their characters so much.

While a lot of the dialog here is improvised, the movie has a honed plot that engages by making us uncomfortable at times and taking several unexpected turns.  Some elements, like Iris’ attraction to Jack, aren’t hard to see coming; others, like Hannah’s interest in motherhood, come as a much bigger surprise.  As the three maneuver through a changing landscape of emotional relationships, the audience alternately squirms and laughs.  You laugh when Jack’s awakened by Iris’ unexpected arrival at the cabin, but you squirm when Iris asks Jack what he was up to the previous night and he lies.  The story takes its characters though a range of surprising, tense, warm and awkward moments.

Then credit the actors with involving us so much in this story.  Emily Blount is effervescent as Iris, creating a trusting open sister for Rosemarie DeWitt’s slightly darker Hannah.  Mark Duplass’ Jack is a troubled bumbler with good intentions.  In scene after scene, these actors inhabit their characters, speaking as the character would and fleshing the characters out with all their good and less-good qualities.  We like these characters thanks to the talent of the actors’ characters, and this is one of the reasons we stay so firmly involved in the movie’s story.

Your Sister’s Sister offers other attractions, too.  The cinematography sometimes excels, like the stationary camera that captures the pillow-talk dialog between Iris and Hannah.  As that scene opens, the sisters’ heads are on separate pillows with Iris’ as close to the edge toward Hannah as possible.  Hannah, though, feeling distant from Iris, has her head in the center of her pillow, to the right of the film frame.  As the scene continues, the bond between the two grows and the distance between their heads diminishes.  There are several instances of such creative camera work.

It’s also refreshing to see a film showing relationships between heterosexual and gay characters where sexual orientation isn’t an issue.  The fact that Hannah is a lesbian is more a source of plot turns than the focus of any of the relationship issues in the film, and Your Sister’s Sister is very much of its time in having a gay character who functions the same way as the straight characters in the film.  This quality is no more evident than at the end which stops right at the fork in the road for the rest of the characters’ lives.

This little film shows the strength of small cinema.  Without big production values and special effects, it creates characters we care about and follows them though the working out of their relationships.  I was happy to spend 90 minutes of my time with these characters.