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DIRECTED BY: Joe Badon
FEATURING: Kali Russell, Linnea Gregg, Holly Bonney
PLOT: Anne must defend her version of a complex series of misunderstandings, tragedies, and hallucinations before an inter-dimensional tribunal.
COMMENTS: I do not research a film before watching it. This typically works in a film’s favor: having formed no preconceptions of what it should be, I tend not to measure it against the wrong yardstick. As in general, so with Joe Badon’s sophomore feature—a rather messy, rather creative, and rather abstruse story about two sisters, several dramatic mishaps, and the nature of memory. Sister Tempest (or, as the credits arrange the title, “Sister Temp Est”), over the course of two hours that felt alternately drawn-out and hasty, presents me with some difficulty. I want to make this review a pitch for it, but I don’t think I can. And I feel a little awkward about that.
It starts off with a breezy sense of promise. The death-of-parents montage that begins the movie had the not-uncharming feel of a Maddin and Brakhage co-production for Troma Studios. The “confession” gimmick, involving a six-entity tribunal headed by a cosmic judge who could moonlight as a Rankin/Bass cartoon-land king, was perhaps an obvious choice, but that didn’t make it a bad one. Slices of temporally re-arranged scenes are smattered alongside hallucinations and false awakenings, but the crux of the narrative is: older sister, Anne the art teacher, alienates younger sister Karen after years of acting as a parent figure. Karen leaves in a huff to spend time with her drug-dealer boyfriend; arriving in her stead is Ginger Breadman, a fragile young art student who appears one day in Anne’s class.
I try to eschew dismissing opinions as being “wrong.” But now, having read up a bit on Sister Tempest, I wonder if my own opinion is in error. (The rest of the IMDb-ternet appears to be in love with this thing.) The film has quite a lot to unpack—symbols, metaphors, metaphoric symbols, allusions, illusions, nods, acknowledgements, Jeff the Janitor—so I wouldn’t say it lacks substance. I never really mustered the will to care, though. It didn’t help that the film was sliced into eight pseudo-cryptically-titled chapters that came across as a, “Hey guy, check out these Smarty-Pants we’re putting on,” more than as anything narratively useful.
From what I’ve read about Badon’s first movie, I presume that he’s improving, which brings to mind the opening sequence’s wrap-up. Alone at a desk, manning his typewriter, sits the screen-writer. Rolling out a sheaf, we watch him read it, crumple it up, and toss it aside. His presence echoes throughout the film, as distant type-clacks occasionally occupy the soundscape. It was an interesting scene that set up an interesting aural motif. There was also good fun to be found in Sister Tempest (even the final iteration of the “gingerbread man” joke got me laughing). But spare me the Looney Tunes gimmicry; spare me the needless musical numbers; and for Heaven’s sake, spare me the multi-Messiah finale. In Tempest‘s spirit of cryptic cognomens, I shall thus conclude with, “The Movie’s Blood is in the Execution–Please do not get blood everywhere.”
Sister Tempest is in online theatrical release until May 31. You can find information on how to watch the film at the official website.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“But spare me the Looney Tunes gimmicry; spare me the needless musical numbers; and for Heaven’s sake, spare me the multi-Messiah finale.”
Ironically, I find myself repeating a similar sentiment as I did in the comments section for this director’s last movie. This sure reads like a line I would see in a normal-movie-liker’s negative review that would make me go, “oh, now I know this movie is good, if the reviewer is complaining about weird excesses!”.
Not that that makes you wrong, since I have no idea what my opinion on this movie would be. And really, to be fair, it’s on me for using that kind of review as a metric so much. It’s my experience that on IMDb, positive reviews of a weird movie tend to be non-specific and wordy praise about how genius it is, while negative reviews of a weird movie cut right to the chase of complaining about all the things that I like, so I always jump right to those.
I guess this is kind of off-topic.
It’s not off-topic: it’s about movies, and that’s what we’re all here for.
The specifics I mention aren’t ones I dislike because they’re weird. I didn’t care for them because, within the greater context of the film, they not only didn’t add to the experience, they detracted from it. There was plenty of “weird” that I enjoyed–in particular, the tribunal that features heavily was well executed and contributed to the goings-on (both narratively and stylistically).
There are many ways to do weird “right”, and those ways are open to the interpretation of both the filmmaker and the viewer. I felt Badon did a good number of weird things right. I also feel, as with those examples, he did a number of them wrong.