THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – “NOT TO BE MISSED”
It was at the Berlin festival, in February 2020, just before the ax of the health crisis. We discovered one of the most beautiful revelations of the competition, Schwesterlein (” Little sister “), second feature film by two Swiss directors from documentaries, Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond. The impressive cast had something to make curious about, with three immense actors of theater and cinema: Nina Hoss, muse of Christian Petzold (Barbara, Phoenix); Jens Albinus, from the Danish scene, who broke onto the big screen with Lars von Trier (Les Idiots, Dancer in the Dark, Le Director, Nymphomaniac…); finally Lars Eidinger, unforgettable Hamlet (among others) in the main courtyard of Avignon, in 2008, with a production by Thomas Ostermeier. Note that Lars Eidinger and Thomas Ostermeier play their own role in Little sister, while playing fictional characters.
To be yourself while becoming another, to escape from documentary reality to go towards the marvelous, such is the promise of this bright and nervous film written by the two filmmakers, also actresses and close to Ostermeier. But far from remaining in the inter-self of the theater, Little sister tells a story of the simplest, a brotherly love, which the staging with Swiss precision and the brilliant work on the sound carry away in a virtuoso whirlwind.
Lisa (Nina Hoss), Berlin playwright, leads an expatriate life in Switzerland which has taken her away from the stage, her companion (Jens Albinus) having been appointed director of an international music school, in the green hills from Leysin. Lisa has a twin brother whom she adores, Sven (Lars Eidinger), a famous German actor with whom she shares the passion for the stage, inherited from the parents – the poisonous Marthe Keller as the political theater-keen mother, disdaining the contemporary author that his daughter has become. Lisa was born two minutes after her brother, and for this reason the latter ironically calls her “little sister”. Sven has leukemia and had to stop working on Hamlet. Lisa is convinced that the set and the rehearsals would give her the energy to fight the disease. But the director and boss of the Schaubühne, David (Thomas Ostermeier), fears to endanger the actor, as well as his production.
Race against time
These are the first minutes of the film, which then focuses on drawing the threads of the relationship between the twins. We are talking here about narrative, musical and gestural threads, because fortunately we will not find any psychologizing thread here. In its race against the time that remains, the film is without pathos, in the urgency of transmitting the most important. How to tell in the cinema this strange feeling that two beings are connected by something invisible? The answer is found in music by Brahms, Schwesterlein precisely, which inhabits the first shots of the film. Lisa is busy, packing her brother’s survival bag with all the medicines, while the lyrical song fills the sound space. Then she goes to the hospital and finds Sven sitting on his bed, headphones and headphones on. Seeing his sister arrive, he takes off the headphones and the music stops. The brother was therefore already there from the first images, although out of view, like a ghost haunting the thoughts of his sister.
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