Chamber Films will showcase the classic and the curious, the weird, the wired and wonderfully askew. There’s no theme, no thesis, no seam running through these films, unless there is. The subconscious is a hell of a film programmer.
Sisters
Dir. Brian De Palma. 1972. Starring Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, William Finley.
Margot Kidder is conjoined French Canadian twins. Or is she? William Finley is her frankly unlikely husband. Or is he? Jennifer Salt is the progressive journalist who witnesses a murder in the apartment opposite. Or does she? Yes, she does. That one’s pretty certain, as we see the murder take place. But will anyone believe her? And who, exactly, is the murderer? That too will be explained through the myriad twists and turns of this sophisticated essay on Hitchcockian voyeurism.
There is split screen here, a series of Hitchcock homages – Bernard Herrmann is on scoring duty – and the peculiar sense of humour that reached its apotheosis in his next film, 1974’s hysterical Phantom of the Paradise. But this film is perhaps the first flowering of De Palma’s later obsessions and, tempered by a youthful satirical bent, his most interesting and personal film.
