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BELOVED
SISTER
5/10
Fahr
zur Holle, Schwester! : Germany 2002 : Oskar Rohler : 89mins
(video
– originally intended for German TV)
‘Beloved
Sister’ is a coyly sarcastic alternative to the original German “Go to
Hell, Sister!”, and that Teutonic directness is much more in keeping with
the film itself: a full-blooded but rather pointless update of Robert
Aldrich’s 1962 ‘Bette Davis vs Joan Crawford’ classic Whatever Happened
To Baby Jane? This time around the Baby Jane figure is Rita (Hannelore
Elsner), who lives in a “big house on the edge of town” where she (supposedly)
cares for her aged mother. Stuck in an early seventies Janis Joplin timewarp,
the flame-haired, garishly overdressed Rita smokes dope, swigs whisky
from the bottle, plays very loud electric guitar and has the word ‘fuck’
tattooed in small capitals on the middle of her forehead - the diametric
opposite of her chic, buttoned-down younger sister Claire (Iris Berben).
In
childhood flashback we see the pair fiercely competitive at their ballet
lessons - Claire has the greater talent, but her ambitions are cut tragically
short when she loses a foot in a bizarre spin-drier accident for which
Rita takes the blame. Four decades pass and Claire, now living abroad,
hears of an expensive operation that may enable her to walk again. She
remembers that her mother had started a bank-account for exactly this
purpose, so returns home – and soon discovers just how deranged Rita has
become in her absence.
Aldrich
fans will enjoy ticking off the references as Rohler plays out the familiar
scenes of sibling cruelty: the blackly comic ‘grisly meal under the serving
dish’; the ‘doomed rescuer’ bit; and of course the claustrophobic grand
guignol equation involving wheelchair, wooden staircase, telephone
and briefly-absent tormentor. There are many tense and effective moments
along the way, with Elsner and Berben making the most of their meaty roles
- the technical contributions from cinematographer Carl-Friedrich Koschnick
and editor Gagana Voigt are tight, economic and professional.
There’s
no doubt that Beloved Sister is very well done for what it is -
but one waits in vain for Rohler and his scriptwriter Nathalie Scharf
to inject anything new into what is very well-worn genre material. At
times the adherence to Aldrich is so slavish as to make Gus Van
Sant’s Psycho shot-for-shot re-make seem slapdash. The final act,
when Sister might at long last break free of its influences and
assert its own personality, is especially disappointing – there’s a mild,
very Baby Jane-ish twist that only the most inattentive viewer
won’t have seen coming a mile off.. Replacing Aldrich’s Hollywood context
with ballet-psychosis may briefly stir memories of Suspiria,
but part of the point of Baby Jane was that Davis and Crawford
were famously lifelong off-screen Hollywood rivals, giving an extra frisson
to their on-screen antagonism which Beloved Sister inevitably lacks.
Scharf
and Rohler have nothing quite so strong to put in its place – although,
on the character level, it’s tempting to side with the brassy, vivid Rita
against the rather goody-two-shoes Claire. The older sister’s energy and
fire, no matter how destructive they ultimately become are perhaps all
too sadly lacking from our homogenised, bland new world of cool blues
and muted greys.
17th
February 2003
(seen on video, 1st February, De Doelen videotheque, Rotterdam
– Rotterdam
Film Festival)
For all the
review from the Rotterdam Film Festival click
here.
by Neil
Young
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