Sometimes a movie is just what you are looking for. Under other circumstances you wouldn’t be drawn in as much while others it has you engrossed. This was the experience I had watching Lynn Shelton’s (Humpday) Your Sister’s Sister. Maybe it was the improvised dialogue, maybe it was the subject matter or maybe it was the realism of the film. Whatever drew me in drawn in I was.
Jack (Mark Duplass – People Like Us, Jeff, Who Lives At Home) has been, in plain English, a mess since his brother Tom died a year ago. He is single, unemployed and basically unhappy. This breaks the heart of his best friend, Iris (Emily Blunt – The Young Victoria, The Five-Year Engagement). After a particularly public meltdown at a memorial party for Tom, Iris decides it is time for an intervention. She tells Jack that he should dust off his red 10-speed bicycle and take the ferry over to her father’s cabin in the woods. There he should spend some alone time trying to figure out his life.
Thinking she is probably right, Jack makes the voyage only to get to the cabin and not be alone. Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt – Rachel Getting Married, Cinderella Man), Iris’s sister is there. Both are a mess. Hannah has just left her girlfriend of seven years. Jack and Hannah break out the tequila and begin pounding them back. In a drunken stupor both decide that sex would be a good idea. After a very quick go at it and waking up the next morning to the sound of Iris pulling her car into the drive, both begin to realize how bad an idea it was to sleep together.
Emily Blunt ever since her breakthrough North American performance in The Devil Wears Prada has become one of my favourite young female actresses. She can do period piece (The Young Victoria), romantic comedy (The Five-Year Engagement), comedy (The Devil Wears Prada), and action (the upcoming All You Need is Kill). A woman with seemingly no limits to the types of characters she can play. In this film she and Rosemarie DeWitt, besides looking so alike that they are believable as sisters, have a great and easy chemistry. They play well off each other and this is heightened even more when you know that they did not really have a script so they are essentially improvising the entire film. She also has a nice chemistry with Mark Duplass. It seems like whomever she works with Blunt clicks with. A very likeable actress.
A low budget affair, the entire film was shot in 12 days. The result is a film that seems very natural and authentic. It shows how complex and fragile human beings and human relationships can be. And that a single action can change several relationships. At times touching, at times poignant, at times downright heartbreaking. I was full in from the very first scene.
Though I’m not going to really go into it, I’m sure people are not going to like the ending. Count myself in that group. It just seemed like a cheap ploy.
A film that people will either love or hate.
Special Features:
-Trailer