Katherine Parker-Hay – Bitch Flicks

‘Our Little Sister’: Making Enough Room for the Half-Sister

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ‘Our Little Sister’ is a mature and subtle exploration of the place of the half-sister within family life; how she fits in and how she transforms what we think the family means. … The camera lingers on Suzu’s face in a moment of indecision: will she go on as before, having no feelings for what are essentially strangers anyway, or will she take a leap of faith that will mean her identity will be forever tangled with theirs?

This guest post written by Katherine Parker-Hay appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood. | Spoilers ahead.

Ideas of the family seem to come interwoven with requirements of unconditional love. Whether we really like our siblings, whether we would have picked them out of a crowd, is beyond the point. The task is to love them as unthinkingly and uncritically as we can manage. But, with such black and white ideologies attached to what family means, the half-sister is surely always on precarious ground; her role seems like an oxymoron by nature. After all, when we think of sisters we tend to think less in halves and more in terms of too much: too much frustration, too much jealousy, too much love. From my experience at least, sisterhood is not something we do in half-measures. So when the half-sister encroaches on the space of the traditional family unit, what do we do with her? How do we make room for her? How does she transform us, if we let her?

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister is a mature and subtle exploration of the place of the half-sister within family life; how she fits in and how she transforms what we think the family means. The story follows three adult sisters: Sachi (Haruka Ayase), who works in a hospital and is struggling because of an affair with a married man; light-hearted Chika (Kaho), who works in a sports shop; and Yoshino (Masami Nagasawa), who works in a bank and has an insatiable appetite for beer and dating. The three live comfortably together in a house left to them by their grandmother. Though not openly discussed, it is apparent that their parents had a difficult breakup, with their father having an affair and their mother disappearing. The siblings now live harmoniously together; however, this balance is disrupted when they are called to their father’s funeral, where they meet their long-estranged half-sister.

On meeting agnate-sibling Suzu (Suzu Hirose), the close-knit trio are forced to question whether a stranger could ever approximate the bond formed through having grown up together. Could this officious girl of a different generation meaningfully be a sister to them? With her nearing proximity, the girls are forced to consider the nature of relationships that seemed entirely natural and obvious. With so few shared points of reference, it would be easy for the sisters to turn away. However, something stops them. Saying a stilted goodbye at the station, the sisters on one side of the glass and the half-sister on the other, Sachi blurts out, “Come and live with us.” The camera lingers on Suzu’s face in a moment of indecision: will she go on as before, having no feelings for what are essentially strangers anyway, or will she take a leap of faith that will mean her identity will be forever tangled with theirs? As the doors close, she calls out, “I will.” Watching this as a child of a broken home left me near to tears. Suzu’s situation, as she considers whether to take the chance, seemed to encapsulate to me the position that a breakup can so often leave a child in: suddenly having to choose over what their family will look like and where its emotional and psychic boundaries will fall. Vulnerable and confused, we witness Suzu in the moment where she has to decide on what she can find enough room for within herself.

The film ambles subtly, Suzu having thrown in her lot with Sachi, Chika, and Yoshi, as it documents the small acts of the sisters making one another feel at home. This is not a simple task when all share such uneasy structural relationships with one another. Suzu starts off feeling awkward, inauthentic – a guest at the house belonging to the “real sisters.” To a friend, she confesses the precarious place that her family history has left her in: her “existence is the reason for other people’s pain.” However, as we watch the three girls in everyday activities like cooking, bathing, and lounging on the floor, we come to see that so much of what matters about being a sister is not the structural relation, the label imposed on the relationship from the outside, but the daily routines. It is the running to the bus together, the annual traditions like making plum wine.

As Suzu gradually becomes more comfortable, they even come to realize that there might be something very special about bringing a half-sister fully into their lives. They have chosen the relationship, chosen each other in the way that one might choose a partner or a best friend. Though not quite that. It is a choice far more willful, because they choose her against the weight of family history and against all the reasons that could have made it so easy to turn away.

Of course, the adult sisters find themselves in a situation that few children of divorced parents could dream of: on fleeing, the mother leaves the family home solely in their hands, to do as they wish. This situation could not be more different than when parents, siblings, half-siblings, and step-siblings, wounds still raw, are all brought together to cohabit under one roof. In such volatile living situations, the bloodlines seem almost fluorescent and, with just the slightest friction, can so quickly demarcate who belongs to whom. In contrast, Our Little Sister hands the protagonists a blank slate in the form of this expansive house that is all their own. They have the chance to establish relationships at a remove from the identity of their mothers and fathers. The empty house, with its excess of uninhabited rooms, becomes symbolic of a new kinship model. It is an elastic space, where they can encounter each other beyond the psychic confines of the Oedipal.

For the sisters, the house becomes a means of shutting out the wider world that would delegitimize their budding yet fragile relationship. The value of the neutral, insulating space of the house is made clear with a surprise visit from the three girl’s mother. During the visit, she casually relates that she is selling the house. She had been unhappy there and does not stop to imagine that her girls could relate any differently to the space. This is a failure of imagination – a failure to allow the children of divorce to move beyond the pain that their parent’s have left them as an inheritance. Similarly, their aunt warns the girls that they should be on their guard against the half-sister, after all, she reminds them, Suzu is “the reason for the breakdown of the parents.” For the aunt, the emphasis falls almost entirely on the half in half-sister, where it is synonymous with tainted and impure. Sachi has to remind her aunt that the affair had been well underway before Suzu was even born. Sachi refuses to reject her half-sister based on a sense of loyalty to her parent’s past, and so refuses the idea that she and her sisters must spend their lives forever reproducing the narrative of their parents’ pain.

Our Little Sister is a gentle probing of how much psychic room we have to create kinships that are more flexible and generous. This is a question often forced upon children of divorced families but, tragically, tends to come at a time when they are too young and too vulnerable for generosity. On the other hand, as adults these sisters have the distance and emotional availability to make space for their half-sister. The idea of this, making enough room for the half-sister, is beautifully illustrated in one of the film’s final scenes. The girls look at their heights at different ages, penciled onto a door frame. This remains an iconic image of family, where each penciled mark seems to boast so much: “my identity is here,” “I belong here, in the family home,” “I was here all along.” How can the half-sister find a place for herself when face-to-face with this? Here is an archive of proof that she came too late and has missed out on too much. Suzu gazes at this height-chart with deference, a late observer of the years already past. But then her sister nudges her and, in a moment that seems to willfully bend time, places a pencil line that definitely marks Suzu’s presence on the frame, in tandem with the others.

Katherine Parker-Hay has a BA in English from Goldsmiths University of London and an MA in Women’s Studies from University of Oxford. She writes on queer theory, women’s cultural output, temporality, and comic serials.

Patty Jenkins’ ‘Monster’: Shouldering the Double Burden of Masculinity and Femininity

In this narrative we see masculinity float free from any ties to the male body, femininity float free from any easy connection to frailness – we see them meet in the one body of this working class woman to excruciating effect.

This guest post by Katherine Parker-Hay appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

When film explores the lives of women who kill, the audience is well-versed in where to locate their corruption: femininity. Think Fatal Attraction’s Alex (1987), Gone Girl’s Amy (2014), the woman shaped alien of Under the Skin (2013). If these figures are evil it is because they choose to act out in ways that contradict traditional views of women. As such they linger on the outside of what is knowable. Again and again, the audience is asked to make intelligible these creatures that don’t quite belong to this world but, as they never quite belong to us, unravelling the secrets of their inner selves is a task that – no doubt intentionally – will forever elude. Patty Jenkins’s Monster is therefore refreshing, bemusing even, because it doesn’t resort to this logic. It refuses this well-worn trope of a female killer whose mysterious inner core we are all so relentlessly on the tail of.

Monster is based on the real life story of Aileen Wuornos, a homeless serial killer who received the death sentence after murdering seven men that picked her up as a prostitute. Wuornos is an enigmatic figure that haunts the public imagination as “America’s first female serial killer” but, rather than rehashing the trope of a mysterious/failed femininity, Jenkins locates Lee’s (Charlize Theron) violence in the fact that she is under pressure to perform both classic femininity and classic masculinity at the same time. Coerced by girlfriend Selby (Christina Ricci), Lee has to be both sole provider and an object endlessly open to exploitation. This pressure is too great for one person. Jenkins’ film charts the excruciating process of Lee crumbling, unable hold the most toxic attributes of both genders together in one body.

The final murder: unable to contain both

Lee finds herself falling for a woman unexpectedly when she stumbles into what happens to be a gay bar and is approached by a naïve and wide-eyed Selby. In the scenes that follow we witness a spellbinding vacuum of roles and Lee, dizzy with first-time desire, soon promises to offer more than she can realistically provide. After a first kiss on the roller skate rink, we quickly cut to the street where the couple are in a hurried embrace behind buildings. Selby has to stop Lee in her tracks, warning that they should find somewhere less public to continue. After offering a nearby yard as a realistic option Lee quickly backtracks, realising that to be with Selby she needs to be ready promise the world. This is an ominous sign of what is to come. Willing to shoulder the burden of classic masculinity, Lee promises to do whatever necessary and they arrange to meet the following evening.

As this scene of erotic discovery transitions into the next, we witness Lee tumbling along the full spectrum of gender – from classic masculinity (unshakable provider, picking up the bill) to classic femininity (vulnerable, able to draw out chivalry from all those around). With the musical score sweeping in to capture the heights of her elation, Lee quite literally spins into the next scene; we roll with her: music still playing from the night before, we see her “hooking” with newfound determination. Her face is steely, ready to take on any role that she might need to in order to accommodate her newfound desires and stay true to her promise. Charlie Shipley makes the point that the musical score of this film doesn’t merely heighten tension as traditionally understood – pop music comes from the world of the characters themselves and marks points where their fantasy lives begin to stretch the bounds of what is ordinarily possible. This certainly appears the case for the poignant transition between these two scenes. In order to surmount the impossible heights of classic masculinity that are now laid at her feet, Lee gathers momentum to beyond herself in an embrace of the hyper-feminine.

Steely with determination: “They had no idea what I could discipline myself to”

Lee understands how to tap into conventional femininity in order to make money. Importantly though, this femininity is not hers in the sense of being derived from some inner core – Lee is able to tune into well-worn tropes circulating society more widely, indeed she is an expert reader of these formulas and draws together a perfect damsel in distress narrative to solicit clients. Her routine is to walk the highway as if a vulnerable hitchhiker and, once inside the cars, she tells of how she is trying to make enough money to get back to her children. She then shows the driver a picture of the kids, his cue to make the chivalrous proposal of an exchange of sex for money. Lee has an exact understanding of how stylised femininity works and pounces upon it, knowing that this is just about the only means, for a woman of her class with dreams as big as hers, to get the money she needs. Hyper-femininity is simply an act that she has trained herself into and this has nothing to do with a mysterious essence that the reader has to bend over backwards in order to comprehend. “The thing no one ever realised about me, or believed, was that I could learn,” she reflects later in the film, “I could train myself into anything.”

However, as the film progresses it becomes clear that Selby is not content living within their means and, at the same time, Lee’s clients are not satisfied by a performance of vulnerability on Lee’s own terms. The men who pick her up are not interested in sexual intercourse alone. They feel entitled to titillating performances of conventional femininity and what’s more they expect her to improvise this free of charge. In one scene we see Lee and a client sitting in the front seats of a car and to Lee’s distress the man is delaying undressing. He badgers her: “Do you have a wet pussy?” Lee looks away and answers with a compliant, “Yeah sure.” “Do you like fucking?” he persists and, unable to draw out the right level of enthusiasm, he says, incredulous, “Jesus Christ, you’d think nobody ever talked dirty to you before.” Lee reassures him with all the energy she can muster: “I just like to settle first you know.” She is unable to keep going to these lengths, yet she is equally unable to disappoint Selby who is waiting for her to return to their motel room cash-in-hand. It is the impossibility of embodying these polar extremes of gender expression that leaves Lee ensnared and desperate. Rather than admit defeat Lee chooses to act out with murderous violence, killing the men who pick her up so that she can take their money.

Roger Ebert has celebrated the way that Theron perfects body language to capture the persona of Lee, writing that the character “doesn’t know how to occupy her body.” As the film goes on, Lee increasingly struggles to hold things together and this discomfort is evoked with every flinch, with every time she meets another’s eye for just that little bit too long. Lee is uncomfortable in her own skin and unable to endure being pulled in both directions. Monster shows a body increasingly stretched, pulled apart by a toxic clash of roles.

Interview: unable to act naturally

Through the character of Lee, Jenkins achieves a dazzlingly fresh approach to women and violence on screen. Watching one woman try and contain so much, trying to be so many different people just to get by, is what makes this film so fascinating. In this narrative we see masculinity float free from any ties to the male body, femininity float free from any easy connection to frailness – we see them meet in the one body of this working class woman to excruciating effect. This is a woman who kills because she is required to embody what so many of us cannot even handle the half of. She takes on all of it, and this proves to be much too much.