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Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters (Beatrice Gibson, 2019)
🕑 Added 2019-06-15 21:42:32 +0000 UTC
While I was a bit ambivalent, and even perplexed, by some earlier Gibson films (such as 2014's F For Fibonacci and 2015's Solo for Rich Man), I have been duly impressed with her last two efforts -- last year's I Hope I'm Loud When I'm Dead and her latest, which is in some senses a related work. This happens sometimes, and I'm not certain whether Gibson's work has shifted in some notable way or if it just took me awhile to get on her wavelength. I plan to revisit the earlier works, but in the meantime, I suspect it may be, as Archer Sterling would say, "a little column A, a little column B."
I Hope I'm Loud was a film that marked a more overtly political turn in Gibson's filmmaking, or at least seemed that way to me at the time. And what is particularly impressive about it is that Gibson's strategy for political filmmaking was, in fact, a turn toward the overtly poetic. Incorporating the words of writers Eileen Myles and CAConrad, as well as a notable citation of Claire Denis, Gibson combined images of protests with somewhat more abstract expressions of freedom and struggle, as if to imply that in a world increasingly controlled by thugs, the aesthetic might be our best available secret code.
Two Sisters expands on this attitude. Taking its inspiration from Gertrude Stein's 1943 murder mystery play (which included three sisters, actually), Gibson's latest film is a meditation on motherhood and sisterhood. In different parts of the film, a black woman and a white woman, both speaking French, describe their hopes and fears regarding the daughters they are bringing into the world. And although they are distinct sets of concerns, they are nevertheless related by their wishes for their daughters' empowerment upon entering a potentially hostile world. One could read this relation-in-difference as a form of intersectional connection, a sort of coalition of affect. They are, perhaps, the sisters who are not sisters.
As a kind of refrain throughout the film, Gibson offers two very different performative talismans. In the early stages of Two Sisters, we see a somewhat androgynous singer performing in a darkened club. Her soulful wail, sort of a blues-rock version on Anohni, becomes slightly more desperate and incomprehensible. She is eventually found in someone's car and thrown out onto the street. By contrast, we see a white poodle who is given access to the spaces from which the singer is eventually barred. The dog wanders the lighted dance floor from I Hope I'm Loud's "Rhythm of the Night" club scene, and is finally seen riding in a car with its head out the window, tooling down the Paris streets. (A group of women stop passers-by with a photo of the dog, asking if they have seen it.) Are the dog and the singer connected, another pair of faux-sisters, or different manifestations of the same figure?
Two Sisters was shot by Ben Rivers, and Gibson made it in collaboration with Ana Vaz and Basma Alsharif. It is always gratifying when that much talent is brought to bear on a project, because the results speak for themselves. Gibson is becoming one of the most compelling experimental filmmakers around, and I look forward to moving both forwards and backwards through her filmography.
