August 2024 Double Feature: Questionable Big Sister Figures

Leave it to big sis

SLUMS OF BEVERLY HILLS (1998)

In Tamara Jenkins’ Slums of Beverly Hills, Rita (Marisa Tomei) is the dysfunctional deadbeat of her family — a vaguely recovering, drug-addled, free-spirited type whose recklessness is greatly eased by her beauty and charm. Freshly out of rehab, Rita is scooped up by her dead broke uncle Murray (Alan Arkin) and his two odd-bird kids Vivian (Natasha Lyonne) and Ben (David Krumholtz). Vivian is a teen on the precipice of high school and desperately wants some control over her sense of burgeoning womanhood, and is equal parts skeptical and delighted by Rita in all of her haphazard femininity. The two create a tenuous but singular sisterly bond — close quarters allowing their connection to form and the liberatory spirit of Rita to infect Vivian at hyperspeed. Veronica P

GINGER SNAPS (2000)

Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Brigitte (Emily Perkins) are joined at the hip. If Ginger leaves a room in an angry huff, Brigitte does too. If Ginger asks Brigitte to pick up the carcass of a dog recently killed by the mysterious being haunting their suburb, Brigitte, with a grimace, picks it up. “Out by sixteen or dead in this scene, but together forever,” Ginger says to Brigitte, reminding her younger sister of the suicide pact they made to honour. Ginger is older only by a year, but she has that effortless confidence and self-assuredness that mesmerizes her younger sister, pulling her in with a mixture of awe and worship, always undergirded by a soul-consuming, self-abandoning love. Ginger has all the answers, always knows what to do when shit hits the fan, always looks after Brigitte. But when she gets brutally attacked by the monster — a werewolf — Brigitte is foisted into the position of decision maker. Ginger Snaps is many things, but weighty among all its captivating themes is its tender look at a particular kind of adolescent sisterhood, the kind that is mimetic, leaving you wishing your particles would be absorbed by your older sister. In this film, the world becomes secondary to the person who shares your blood, who is so impossibly cool and yet still loves you, who takes care of you when you feel like you don’t deserve it. A kind of sisterhood that deals a love so urgent as to make you want to crawl into her skin, as to make you want to defy every law — moral, scientific, civil — this is one of Ginger Snaps’s most precious gifts. - Alisha M