Your Sister's Sister ****

Lynn Shelton’s new film about relationships, both sibling and romantic, is a very sweet and funny three-hander between the lovely Emily Blunt, the equally lovely but cynical and kind of spiky Rosemarie DeWitt, and the endearing emotional mess that is Mark Duplass.

Iris (Blunt) sends her best friend Jack (Duplass) to stay at her family’s remote cabin after an outburst at a memorial party shows he is still struggling to come to terms with his brother’s death a year on.  The idea is for him to cycle there, spend some time in solitude away from distractions, think about his life, and come back a slightly saner man.  When he arrives at the cabin however he finds Iris’s sister Hannah (DeWitt) there for a similar reason, having just split up from her girlfriend of seven years.   Tequila is drunk, lesbianism is temporarily rescinded, and they sleep together.  Iris shows up the next day, unaware of the drunken shenanigans, she reveals to her sister that she is secretly in love with Jack, and over the next few days their entwined relationships get a little knotty.

The strength of this film lies in the first rate performances from all three actors (aside from the first scene they are the only people in the film).  Blunt and DeWitt manage to pull off that complicated sisterly relationship, balancing closeness with a never acknowledged undermining of each other that anyone with siblings will recognise.  The awkwardness between Duplass and DeWitt is also completely convincing and never feels contrived.  All three characters are witty, and endearingly ‘damaged’, but the film manages never to stray into the self-absorption of bad hipster movie territory.

A great scene comes near the end of the film that subtly captures the tone of the whole.  Jack is trying to destroy his bike – he throws it to the ground repeatedly but it barely bends.  It’s simultaneously sad and funny because he’s trying to take his despair out on this bicycle, but his grand dramatic gesture falls flat.  It’s emotionally moving, about dealing with death, and life, but it’s low-key and funny and somehow realistic.  Not many people have a cabin in the beautiful wilderness that they can escape to when life gets too difficult, but everyone has had that moment of frustration when they’ve tried to smash a wall and all they’ve achieved is a throbbing toe.  

Latin! Or Tobacco and Boys - Burton Taylor Studio, 24-28 January 2012

In the days before Stephen Fry was a national treasure and generally beloved know-it-all, when he was still a student at Cambridge, he wrote the comedy two-hander Latin! Or Tobacco and Boys. And, as you would perhaps expect from a play written by a young male student, sex is never far from the forefront.

The Burton Taylor studio is transformed into a classroom (well, there are some benches on the stage for the brave) as the audience become the students of Dominic Clarke, ably played by Barnabas Iley-Williamson, a Latin master with a passion for his subject, for youth, and for one of his 13 year old pupils, Cartwright. His relationship with the boy is found out by the pipe-smoking Herbert Brookshaw, played by Louis Fletcher, who promises to keep his secret in return for a bit of late night whipping from Clarke and some activities with peanut butter that one can only assume wouldn’t involve toast.With that kind of subject matter it’s not that surprising that this play doesn’t get laid on very often.

There is a difficult balance to be held between simply getting laughs out of the shock of the controversial and getting laughs because of the witty writing. The steady stream of sexual innuendo was very funny, and the interaction between Mr Clarke and his imaginary students was entertaining, but I suspect that there may have been quite a few Latin sex jokes that went over my head. Either that or the rest of the audience were far more worldly than me.

Come the climax, I have to admit that I was left a little unsatisfied. I think maybe I just didn’t get the full thrust of the play. There’s no need for performance anxiety though. I’m sure it’s great, if you like that sort of thing.

Original review here