Sisters (1972, Brian De Palma) (Patreon)

Had hoped to finally embrace a "true" De Palma film—The Untouchables, easily my favorite, is clearly a work-for-hire, all but disregarded by his hardcore fans—and assumed I had reason for optimism, since I'm comparatively warm on the two others Criterion has released (Blow Out and Dressed to Kill). Instead, I'm trying to decide whether this is even more egregiously stupid than Raising Cain and Passion, both of which nearly sprained my oft-rolling eyeballs. Apart from some typically magnificent split-screen work, which constitutes a tiny percentage of the running time, there's hardly anything here that's not soberly* ridiculous, from Kidder's atrocious "French-Canadian" accent (which I initially thought was meant to be Russian!) to the lurid nightmare sequence that sees Grace, in what I guess is supposed to be psychological solidarity with a woman about whom she knows almost nothing (and while under hypnosis, so ostensibly being manipulated, to what purpose I could not say), imagines herself grafted to Danielle. Or maybe it's to Dominique. (Briefly thought this nightmare was a flashback/twist, which would have meant that Sisters thinks conjoined twins can be fraternal. Thankfully, the film isn't quite that moronic.)  The Hitchcock "homages" start here, and as usual look more like shameless ripoffs to my eyes. Mostly, though, I've just never found De Palma's formal prowess so thrilling as to overwhelm, or even to much compensate for, his inexplicable attraction to blatant idiocy. You can plot my enthusiasm directly onto the quality of the scripts. This script is terrible, and (Durning excepted) poorly acted to boot. Hence, ugh.

(Oh, and somebody please explain the ending to me. [SPOILERS now.] Why does it even matter that Grace has been hypnotized into exonerating Danielle, who's been arrested for killing Emil? Or that Durning's private dick is surveilling a couch that now won't ever be claimed? This epilogue plays like some sort of final knife twist, but nobody's actually getting away with anything; the only real victims are Dead Sofa Dude's unseen loved ones, who'll never know what happened to him. Hard to believe we're supposed to care about that.)

* Some may dispute this adverb. Vincent Canby, for example, in his 1973 review, calls Sisters "a good, substantial horror film with such a sense of humor that it never can quite achieve the solemnly repellent peaks of Roman Polanski's Repulsion." Putting aside my nausea at seeing this hokum compared (even in a negative way) to Polanski's masterpiece, I submit that the "sense of humor" Canby identifies is really just absurdity (as distinct from absurdism). The film's tone and rhythm aren't remotely comic; what's "funny" is a recurring degree of overkill** that's hard to distinguish from ineptitude. Or so I firmly believe, anyway. That's surely the crux of my disagreement with De Palma fans. 

** Did a quick search for "de palma humor" and found e.g. a Reverse Shot piece—on Sisters, as it happens—that argues his films are "full of blatant humor, from the over-the-top insanity of Scarface to the pure excess of Body Double." Those attributes aren't per se comedic. Plenty of over-the-top insanity and pure excess in Gaspar Noé's oeuvre, for example, but I don't remember laughing much.