SUNDANCE: Over her four feature films Seattle director Lynn Shelton has developed a few signature moves: Her characters often retreat into a wooded corner of the Pacific Northwest for a period of rejuvenation; the action is triggered when one character turns up at another character’s door unexpectedly; and the ensuing high concept plotline is effaced with naturalistic performance and shooting styles. For a filmmaker known for her reliance on improvisation, there is a suspiciously auteur-like consistency across her body of work.
Your Sister’s Sister, Shelton’s latest, extends her ticks and preoccupations into new terrain. Where 2007’s My Effortless Genius and her 2009 Sundance breakout Humpday focused on the wondrous if sometimes uncomfortable inner workings of white male friendship, Your Sister’s Sister, as you might have guessed, involves the female sibling bond. And yet the perspective still feels pretty dude-centric, which makes sense given that the central idea for the film came from Shelton’s muse and two-time leading man Mark Duplass. Duplass plays Jack, a thirtysomething guy not unlike Andy Samberg’s character in another Sundance feature, Celeste and Jesse Forever. Unemployed and unmotivated, Jack is in a funk that may have been triggered by his brother’s death a year ago, and his charged but platonic attachment to his brother’s ex-girlfriend Iris (Emily Blunt) is holding him in romantic limbo.
After he makes a bit of a boor of himself at an intimate memorial for his brother, Iris sends Jack out to her family’s cabin on the islands off the Washington coast. As it turns out Iris’s sister Hannah (Rosemary Dewitt) had the same idea in the wake of a break-up with her girlfriend of seven years. Despite an awkward initial encounter the two agree to share the place and nurse their respective wounds. After a long first night commiserating over tequila they wind up sharing more than that, and though at first it seems the indiscretion was strictly booze-fueled, other possible motivations eventually emerge.
What makes even the outrageous hairpin turns in Shelton’s films feel natural is her constant, scene-level focus on the flow of human relations—the ordinary ways in which we reveal ourselves and are revealed to each other. All of her films can be broken down to two or three people in a room, in a bed, or around a table talking, and the pleasure of Your Sister’s Sister is also in its conversations—in three very different and distinct people with vested interests in each other talking about everything except the one thing they should be talking about until they can no longer not talk about it. Often these conversations involve setting new terms for longstanding relationships; Shelton is interested in exploring unconventional solutions for age-old problems. Because most of the script is improvised, Shelton’s shooting ratio is extremely high, which means the story is shaped in the editing room. And yet the result feels driven by a personal sensibility; skillful editing, gorgeous scenic cinematography, and an unobtrusive original score set Your Sister’s Sister apart from the indie aesthetic Sundance helped make famous.
Duplass has perhaps never been better in the relatively boilerplate role of the impulse-challenged man-child, and both the character of Iris and the loosened format bring out a softness and vulnerability in Blunt that we haven’t seen before. In a way the two behave like children together—clearly in love but terrified of risking the innocence of their affection—where Dewitt carries the weight of more grown-up burdens. The resolution to the extreme love triangle that gets set up is a little too convenient and the ending too coy, and yet they fade quickly. What stands is the film’s abundance of pure but seemingly minor moments shared between people—the ones that wind up meaning everything.
