Veronica’s November Recommendations
SISTER ACTS — A collection of films dedicated to the sharp elbows, rough edges, and less acknowledged corners of sisterhood.
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951)
Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire opens with Blanche Dubois (Vivien Leigh) tornadoing into her little sister Stella’s (Kim Hinter) rundown New Orleans home. Blanche’s reasons for arriving are unclear; all that is for certain is that Blanche is a hot mess. But as Stella tenderly cares for her sister, at moments almost like Blanche is a child, one wonders if Blanche came because she knew Stella was the only one who could adequately care for her spiritual wounds. The sisters’ deep connection is their only protection against Stella’s seductive brute of a husband, Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando), who is determined to splinter Stella and Blanche’s almost inherent and deeply felt kinship. For a film often shrouded in the stardom of Marlon Brando, Stanley is, in actuality, the most static piece of Streetcar; simply a force for Stella and Blanche to orbit around as they remain the two truly star-crossed lovers in this whole tragedy.
FAT GIRL (2001)
Sixteen-year-old Elena (Roxane Mesquida) is spending her family summer vacation having a sexually formative fling. In the meantime, Elena’s little sister, Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux), is fulfilling her sisterly role as perennial third wheel to the new couple; sometimes at a proximity that even borders on taboo. As the two sisters observe each other changing in the midst of a new closeness to sex, bodies, and womanhood, they parse apart their feelings in interactions that range from petty and juvenile to aching and cerebral (as most sisterly conversations tend to ebb and flow). As Fat Girl progresses, what most would assume is an individual coming-of-age for Elena feels more and more like a shift in both sisters’ understandings of each other and themselves. In classic Catherine Briellat form, Fat Girl is uneasy and unflinching in its simplest moments, and utterly startling and gut-wrenching in its most complex ones.
LITTLE WOMEN (2019)
Where Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird is a meditation on the roles of mothers and daughters, Little Women can just as easily be seen as a meditation on sisterhood. Amy (Florence Pugh), Jo (Sairose Ronan), Meg (Emma Watson), and Beth (Eliza Scanlen) certainly bicker with and cause petty pains for one another purposefully, what Little Women gets most accurate about sisterhood is the way that the biggest tragedies of sisterhood are often caused inadvertently, stored in the spaces where we love unconditionally. The most love and most pain felt between the sisters occur in matters out of their control—in Beth’s chronic illness, in Amy and Jo’s inadvertent longing and rejections of the same man, in the fact they are going to love others and start different lives that do not center totally around each other, but instead marriage and children and new lives.
GINGER SNAPS (2000)
Sisters Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Brigitte (Emily Perkins) are the ultimate teen duo; utterly codependent, faux fatalistic, and certain they’ve got it all figured out. Their unflinching, adolescent certainty that they’re different than the rest of their boring suburban town is proved perversely correct when Ginger is attacked on the night of her first ever menstrual cycle and begins turning into a monster. Part campy-Canadian horror fare, part-aching sister soulmate bond, Ginger Snaps is an ode to unconditional sisterly love—tails, flesh consumption, and all.
SHARP STICK (2022)
Sisters Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth) and Treina (Taylour Paige) are complete opposites. Treina is adopted, a serial dater, and a wannabe influencer, who bonds with their wild child mother through discussions of their various trysts. Sarah Jo is quiet, naive, painfully optimistic, and completely sexually inexperienced. When Sarah Jo begins taking the sexual advice their mother gives Treina instead of her, she jumpstarts a tryst with the married father she works for. Sarah Jo’s clumsy mimicking of the social scripts that her sister moves through so effortlessly is about much more than just sisterhood, but it perhaps take the envy, love, and comparison that comes with being so closely tied to another woman in the way sisters inherently are for Sarah Jo to begin the her messy sexual journey.
Alisha’s November Recommendations
Seeing Double — November feels like a prelude. Like that amorphous stretch of time between Christmas and New Years’ Eve, the month seems full of longing and anticipation. Seeming incomplete, November is hard to conceive of without December, it’s as if it needs the other to exist, needs the other for its meaning. November feels like a twin of December, less glamorous and always leaning toward the latter, but at the same time, the month is not December’s polar opposite.
This curious, half-complete month got me thinking of other half-completes, specifically of on-screen twins. Accordingly, the following is a list not just of on-screen twins, but of singular actors who play a set of twins who are more complex than mere representations of each other’s opposites. The following films challenge our ideas of what it means to have a double, what it means to lack and to be completed, and what it means to be a full person. They’re in turn dark and funny, and more than having you seeing double, the following films will have you wondering whether you are unique and full in our singularity.
DEAD RINGERS (2023 TV series)
This reboot of David Cronenberg’s 1988 creepy classic of the same name is helmed brilliantly by Rachel Weisz, who plays the beguiling Mantle twins to utter perfection. Beverly and Elliot are gynecologists with contrasting personalities working to open up a clinic that aims to change the way women give birth; the series follows them as they, in turn, achieve and bungle this goal. The series adds a staunchly modern and feminist twist to Cronenberg’s vision, and is a super fun, if at times visually and philosophically disturbing, watch as Weisz’ Mantle twins trade places in an attempt to achieve what they can’t on their own. What is endlessly enrapturing is Weisz’ performance — she leans unabashedly into Elliot’s outgoing and unceremonious personality, constantly and indulgently tucking into food, delighting in its sensuous pleasure, making an orgasmic feast of a burger, while for Beverly she is muted and bracketed, shy and fluttering. Weisz’ prowess as an unmatched actor is on stunning display in a show that challenges not only our perceptions of womanhood, undergirding beauty with an oozing grotesquery at every chance, but also our notions of what it means to love not only as a sibling but also as a twin, what it can mean to have another body and mind identical to oneself. The show is cunning and jubilantly naughty as it explores all those verboten and illicit sensations and thoughts when it comes to having another body that is like one’s own.
LEAVES OF GRASS (2009)
Much less macabre than Weisz in Dead Ringers, though no less wily, is Edward Norton in this dark comedy about a prim and proper Ivy League professor getting dragged into a scheme to take down a small-town drug lord by his drug-dealing twin brother. Toying with ideas of good and bad, this film presents Norton with the unique challenge of riffing off of himself, and it’s a challenge that Norton seems to have great fun with. He portrays both a pedantic philosophy professor with impeccable grammar and an Oklahoma drug dealer with small dreams but cunning practical acumen who says “lay you down,” to the chagrin of his academic brother, to charming effect. Norton is delightful to watch as he challenges himself and his characters. It’s also fun to watch an academic landing on his ass as he is reminded of the importance of practical soundness in the application of the water-tight theories he teaches, and that what it means to be good is always shifting in the real world, as the existence of various schools of ethical thought ought to demonstrate. This is a unique film that has fun with the many ideas of moral goodness, and it makes place for a kind of human fallibility that academics often overlook, and its distinct gift is that it articulates such a heated dynamic — between the earthly and the lofty — through the interplay of identical twins.
I KNOW WHO KILLED ME (2007)
Lindsay Lohan probably is the first to come to mind when anyone mentions twins on film, courtesy of her pitch-perfect performance(s) in Parent Trap. But there’s another film in which she plays a set of twins that seems to serve as a unique form of closure or response to anyone hanging onto the sweetness of her performance in the 1998 film, and who might judge her for her growth in the intervening years. In I Know Who Killed Me, Lohan plays two young women, the first is Aubrey, who, with every advantage in the world, is studious and a skilled fiction writer on track to have an illustrious career. The second is Dakota, who claims to come from a working-class background and works as an exotic dancer. After the discovery of a gruesome murder in town, Aubrey goes missing, and it is ascertained that a serial killer is on the loose. But when she is found, she claims she is Dakota. As Dakota, Lohan swears up a storm and has sex to her heart’s content, tearing through the sweet image many held of her at the time, showing the world that she is human and that she has matured into adulthood, and that there is nothing at all wrong with that. This film is fun for it allows Lohan to play around with her star image, but it is deeply compelling and intriguing for the way in which it challenges our notions of femininity, propriety, and the power of money to determine a life’s trajectory.
WONDER MAN (1945)
This Danny Kaye comedy is, strangely, a lighter, less grim twin of I Know Who Killed Me. Kaye plays a nightclub entertainer who is murdered by a gangster, and whose ghost returns to help his shy, book-wormy twin brother bring the murderers to justice. The film was a trailblazer for its use of double exposure (it won the Best Special Effects Oscar in 1945), having Kaye stand beguilingly and mesmerizingly before himself, conversing with and riffing so compellingly off of his double. The film abounds with gravity-defying stunts, not to mention seizes the opportunity to allow Vera-Ellen (in her debut feature) to showcase her jaw-dropping balletic and acrobatic skill, but it’s a triumph for the way in which it allows Kaye the breadth, spatial and verbal, to flex his comedic chops. Kaye is spellbinding in turn as the loud and irreverent nightclub entertainer, and as the adorable and nervous academic. The film’s final scene is a riot in the best way possible, as it thrusts Kaye onto an opera stage in an attempt to communicate with the District Attorney. This film is perhaps one of the ur-texts when it comes to modern-day twin films, fleshing out a vibrant and technically ambitious blueprint that perhaps Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde sketched out, serving as the darker film’s brighter twin. In any case, an achievement of a meditation on what duality means and entails, Wonder Man is truly a wonder.