Opening with notes audibly resembling a heartbeat monitor, before swaying into a diegetic sonata, this year’s Swiss Oscar entry “My Little Sister,” chillingly captures the frightening feeling of sitting beside a loved one in unspeakable pain, knowing there’s not a thing you or the medical staff can do about it. “Your mask,” a bed-side nurse reminds formerly renowned playwright, Lisa (Nina Hoss) after dozing off next to her twin brother, Sven (Lars Eidinger), an acclaimed actor in the Berlin theater scene, whose leukemia has become bellicose again.
While the film’s parallels to COVID-19 are likely just a coincidence, directors Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond’s film acutely reveals how escalating ailments of life can break one down and reveal who others really are at heart, as what someone values and how much they care for the same aspects of existence as you bluntly reveals itself – people whom you thought you were close with bemoaning that the hardship of last-minute change throws too much of a wrench into their own isolated world(s).
Featuring two awards-caliber performances by Hoss and Eidinger, “My Little Sister” intensely encapsulates the loss of vitality being seeped from the fiber of your being with the disappearance of collaborative energy. Shot in a handheld, realist style with relationship bickering and philosophical musings that occasionally evokes the thoughtful, highbrow intellectualism of European filmmaking talents like Olivier Assayas or Mia Hansen-Løve (albeit with a lot less levity than the former filmmaker’s works) – characters using terms like Elizabethan or Alexandrine – Chuat and Reymond’s movie also acts as a meditation on the faith and faithfulness of the theatrical artist, though its squabble-heavy long takes do sometimes play a bit heftier than is perhaps needed given the weighty subject matter.
At the start of the film, Lisa – who is all of two minutes younger than her unashamedly queer, performance artist of a brother – aids Sven in getting himself settled back at home following a transplant procedure. They swing by his theater company, Sven surprising his troupe by regaling them with the monologue of a Danish prince, revealing himself from behind the curtain. Given his medical condition, he was replaced in the upcoming production of “Hamlet” by his understudy, and, although he insists he knows every line by heart, even Ophelia’s, the director is trepidatious of relinquishing the lead role back to him. Lisa goes to battle for her brother, promising that he becomes a completely different person when he steps out on stage, but it doesn’t appear the director will budge on his stance, who mentions that Lisa that she should start writing again, as the new young and hot scribes are pumping out three successful works by the time they’re 25. But Sven’s sister has more pressing matters to take care of at present.
Her increasingly stressful responsibilities only continue to grow when it becomes clear that their narcissistic mother (Marthe Keller) is ill-equipped to deal with the situation, not even able to assist her son with his protein shakes and daily medications without feeling burdened by his deteriorating state. At the same time, Lisa’s husband, Martin (Jens Albinus), wants to extend his contract at an upper echelon, Swiss alps boarding school, which would require him to live far from Berlin (where Sven currently is) for at least five years. Complications keep escalating, Lisa finding herself on a frantic phone with the doctor about a bone transplant whilst walking into an important meeting to impress possible academic sponsors.
“My Little Sister” is a fairly short film that does certainly feels its length, and the story isn’t aiming to swerve anywhere surprising, simply terminally inevitable. The first 30 to 40 minutes almost end up blending together – especially once dramatic momentum kicks in around the hour mark, starting with a breathtaking parasailing sequence that provides a respite from the films purposefully grueling aesthetic. Lisa and Martin’s bickering quarrels over how and where to raise their children is a tad exhausting but ends up walking the narrative tightrope just lightly enough that it doesn’t fall into dramatically unforgiving territory.
Many of the movie’s most powerful moments occur while Lisa is on the phone, such as one phenomenal take where she loses her composure standing in front of the hospital lobby’s vending machine. There’s another sequence in the ICU that drowns at all the dialogue, pulsing piano score piercingly implemented to accentuate the life-or-death situation through camera staging and panic-struck lips moving in silence. Through scenes like these, “My Little Sister,” poignantly captures the fleeting nature of life’s ultimate preciousness. It won’t be an easy watch for some – especially in a year like 2020 – but it’s a miraculous performance piece, reflecting on the ever-intense volume of how precarious one’s existence can be. [B/B-]