Look Who's Looking

So you think getting separated from your conjoined twin will solve all your problems. It's just the beginning for Danielle in Brian De Palma's 1972 film Sisters. As is so often the case with De Palma's early films, it's soaked with Hitchcock references. In this case, he puts Hitchcock plot points, compositions, and music into a blender and sees what sticks. Critics have then straightened it all out into a statement on voyeurism and women. But I mainly got the feeling as I was watching that De Palma was following a path dictated by whim. Which wasn't a bad idea.

My two favourite things about the movie are Margot Kidder and Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann's score is just lovely. Of course.

Kidder plays Danielle, a French Canadian model who used to be joined at the hip (literally) to her sister. She puts on the most adorable French accent. My ear can't judge its accuracy but it's so cute.

We're introduced to her as the star of a candid camera show in which she pretends to be a blind woman who starts undressing in front of Phillip (Lisle Wilson), who doesn't know he's being filmed. This short segment presents us with a hall of mirrors of voyeurism already. We don't know at first we're watching Danielle consentually undressing for an audience. We don't know that Phillip's voyeurism is exposed to an audience he hadn't yet consented to.

After the show, Phillip and Danielle go out on a date, their pretext for beginning a relationship on nice, subtly perverted ground.

The film becomes about a murder and, as in Psycho, we switch protagonists to a new character, Grace (Jennifer Salt). She's a reporter whom the cops dislike and don't believe when she says she saw a murder across the street. We have voyeurism, points of view, and the debatable validity of perspective.

The last act of the film isn't as interesting but still good. I do wish De Palma had managed to stay with Danielle more, I enjoyed observing her.

Sisters is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Life of Lois

After hearing Margot Kidder passed away yesterday I decided to watch Superman II again last night (the Donner cut). The first film's better than either version of the sequel but I feel like Kidder has more screentime in II, despite being fifth or sixth billed. This is probably do to other actors' agents being better negotiators, leveraging clout for higher profiles. Thankfully to-day actors seem to have too much shame to pull that kind of thing.

Superman II is a movie about shame, Marlon Brando's ghost (in the Donner version) imbuing Superman with the sense of duty--telling him virtue is its own reward in an earlier scene, setting up the idea that having a relationship with Lois is too selfish. To be fair, a relationship does take a lot of time and Kal-El probably already wastes too much time being Clark Kent. There are probably at least a million horrible things happening every minute in the world that would benefit from Superman's attention.

Still, it's weird to stick to such a point of logic when we're talking about a movie where Superman can reverse time by reversing the Earth's rotation and it seems to take an hour for that kid to fall down Niagara Falls. And Margot Kidder looks so sweet in the super shirt.

Richard Donner, director of the first film, was fired from the second film and replaced by Richard Lester, who received credit for the theatrical version released in 1981, despite a lot of footage having been shot by Donner. Donner finally released a cut in 2006 which, among other things, restored Marlon Brando's scenes to the film--he'd been entirely cut in the Lester version. But there are a lot of other differences, too, like the fact that the first scene with Kidder and Reeve is entirely different.

I'll admit the juicer scene in the Lester version is a little funnier than the scene in the Donner one where Lois starts to figure out Clark bears an uncanny resemblance to Superman. But I like the energy of the Donner version better. Nothing quite equals the His Girl Friday inspired tone in the first film's first scenes with Lois but Donner maintains a sweetly innocent tone that every incarnation of Superman since has taken itself too seriously to attempt. Even though Lois drawing glasses on a picture of Superman clearly seems to have been inspired by a thousand conversations people've likely had that began with, "Why doesn't Lois ever . . . ?" It's the story playing catch up with the too clever audience but at the same time reminding us that such nitpicking misses the point.

Kidder never seems dumb when she's not seeing the Superman behind the bumbling Clark--she had the sense to play it straight and like the screwball comedies that inspired most of her scenes with him there's plenty of other things going on to distract her from examining him. Why should he be the centre of the universe? The common criticism is that Clark is a long term joke Superman is playing on Lois but in the Donner films the persona is almost like a form of self-punishment, an exercise in keeping himself humble. It's like he's silently pleading with Lois to be his dom but she hilariously has no time for it aside from a few random crumbs of cruelty. And kudos to Lois for not falling into that black hole. Kidder's performance in particular is as much a surpassingly human take on Lois as Reeve's is on Superman. In spite of my problems with the Zack Snyder films, I do think Amy Adams is good casting, but Margot Kidder is always the "real" Lois for me.