Stealing from the rich, giving to his poor sister in Swiss Alps drama
When she was 8 years old, Ursula Meier spotted a young thief at an Alpine ski resort up the hill from her hometown near the FrenchSwiss border. Three decades later, an image of the boy popped back into Meier’s head as she wrote the screenplay for “Sister,” which opened Friday in San Francisco.
“It’s funny, because I’d already started writing the script when I woke up one day and suddenly the memory came back to me,” Meier recalls. “I went, ‘Oh my God, that little boy was in my sub-unconscious somewhere all along.’ ”
The writer-director recalls, “Seeing this kid who has no friends, who’s forbidden from going into the restaurant at the ski resort — it captured my imagination. I wondered to myself, where are his parents?”
Meier’s fictional response centers around 12-year-old Simon ( Kacey Mottet Klein). He survives by stealing skis and sandwiches from wealthy vacationers at a luxury Alpine resort. Simon sells the equipment to pay rent on a grungy apartment that he shares with a 26-year-old slacker, Louise ( Léa Seydoux).
The film’s mountain setting appealed to Meier because it dramatized the contrast between haves and the have-nots, she explains. “You have this industrial plane at the bottom of the mountain, and if you follow the smoke from the factory up into the air, you arrive at another world. A very rich world. I was fascinated by this verticality.”
“Sister,” Switzerland’s entry into the foreign film Oscar race, offers no background on its peculiar lead characters. “I wanted this to feel more like a fable or fairy tale,” Meier explains.
She also skipped standard plot twists. Meier notes, “It’s so easy if you run out of inspiration to create a scene where you go, ‘Ring ring, hello, this is the social worker!’ We didn’t want that kind of thing because even though ‘Sister’ starts out like a social film, it goes in another direction when you learn the truth about the relationship between Simon and Louise. At that moment you feel it becomes more of a love story between these two characters.”