Serving-class Saints

Genet-ration X: Maids Jodhi May and Joely Richardson
huddle for warmth in "Sister, My Sister."

'Sister, My Sister' adapts

'The Maids' for the screen

By Donald Hines

In a provincial French town in 1932, the Papin sisters, maids in a middle-class household, tore the eyes out of their brutal mistress and her daughter. They offered no defense for the murders, only asking that each other be spared. The event inspired Jean Genet's absurdist play The Maids (1948), in which he took liberties with the story in order to elevate the sisters to his favorite status of criminal saint.

Sister, My Sister preserves Genet's indictment of repression and bourgeois hypocrisy. but slips a girdle of causality onto the brutal events. The older sister, Christine (Joely Richardson), had cared for her younger sibling, Lea (the endearing Jodhi May), when they had lived much like animals before being shipped to a convent. They are finally reunited as maids in the household of the domineering Madame Danzard (Julie Walters), who combines the brassiness of Ethel Merman with a drill sergeant's attention to protocol in the running of the household.

The disturbed sisters' affection grows moist (they share a bed), yet Madame seems as upset by their ardor as by the homemade lace garments they wear on their one afternoon off (they're not dressing like servants, you see), so she plans to separate the sisters. This BBC Channel 4 Production is lovingly photographed, designed and paced; the constant ticking of a metronome in the study counts off each measure in their unventilated small-town lives. The film's handsome cast and atmosphere try to dress-up some fuzzy-headed message about the fragility of family bonds and how poverty and neglect can exacerbate improper love and madness. For all its fine performances and stifled mood, Sister, My Sister fails to explain the inexplicable.

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Sister, My Sister (Unrated;102 min.), directed by Nancy Meckler, written by Wendy Kesselman, based on the play by Jean Genet, photographed by Ashley Rowpe and starring Johdi May, Joely Richardson and Julie Walters.


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