Stealing childhood
“Sister”, directed by Ursula Meier
The French title of Sister is L’Enfant d’En Haut, and it’s a better title, if only because the film has less to do with any sister than with a boy named Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein). Simon steals ski equipment from an Alpine resort high above the valley where he lives, a place so far away that the area around his apartment building isn’t even covered by snow.
When he’s up on the mountain, Simon watches as wealthy parents help their children with skis and lunches. He behaves with a discomfiting mix of worldliness and naïveté. He steals ski equipment, but he doesn’t know how to ski. He steals in order to, as he puts it, buy stuff like toilet paper and eggs. He tries to befriend the English cook who helps him fence the stolen goods, but he discovers that the cook, like nearly everyone else, wants to see him only as an adult and a thief. In their eyes, he is never a kid.
Even Simon’s sister, Louise (Léa Seydoux), with whom he lives, tells him before she disappears for several days that he’ll be fine, because he is ‘big’. She quits her job and begins to depend on Simon’s activities to pay for their food, and for her cigarettes and booze. Eventually, their relationship is revealed to be more intimate and complicated than it initially seems, but the film stops somewhat short of catharsis, and the relationship feels underdeveloped as a consequence. Seydoux’s Louise does not balance her despair with convincing tenderness and ends up seeming too cruel, which is a missed opportunity in an otherwise strong film.
Still, Sister does resonate emotionally in its affection towards childhood. Though we see numerous shots of Simon traveling via gondola, the frame is always cropped carefully, as if it were concealing part of the crossing. Given how different the spheres of Simon’s life seem, this unseen threshold takes on the character of the divide between his reality and his dreams. The closing scenes show Simon on the mountain after the end of the season: empty, with almost no snow, but beautiful nonetheless. He waits, alone. The final shot shows him on his way back down, suggesting a certain acceptance: reality may not meet his dreams, but at least in reality he’s not alone.
