2006, USA/Canada
Following the same basic plot outline as De Palma’s film (see previous entry) – including the emulation of certain key scenes – Buck’s film takes innovative liberties with the characters that significantly bolster their sympathetic qualities.
Dominique and Danielle have been renamed Angelique and Annabelle, and where De Palma treats his female characters as experiments – just as his Dr. Breton does – Buck allows them to develop a kinship with one another throughout the narrative.
In Buck’s version of events (set in Vancouver, Canada), reporter Grace Collier (Chloë Sevigny) is onto Dr. Lacan (Stephen Rea) from the outset, and has been tracking his “improper procedures on children” in the years since he was indicted on related charges.
She approaches Angelique (Lou Doillon, daughter of Jane Birkin and director Jacques Doillon), Lacan’s ex-wife and one-half of famed Siamese twins, and offers an escape route from his controlling influence: “Help me, and maybe I can help you”, she says, but Lacan’s influence will be hard to shake – especially as Angelique relies on him to furnish her with addictive experimental drugs that allegedly keep her darker half at bay.
Still, Angelique finds relief in allowing herself to tell Grace how she and her sister came into Lacan’s care via her mother, a love-struck French woman who allowed herself to be experimented on by Lacan.
This leads Grace to another woman, Dr. Mercedes Kent (Canuck staple Gabrielle Rose), who served as a nurse for Lacan at the time the twins were born.
Grace and Dr. Kent bond over a cigarette (an illicit act in Vancouver, where smoking was banned in 2000) as they watch an old 16mm film of the twins’ birth, and Dr. Kent relates stories of arranging sneak meetings between the babies and their mother because visitation was formally denied.
The footage continues to document the conjoined sisters just prior to separation as teenagers. It is here that Grace learns that Annabelle, the despondent ‘other’ sister, died in that operation.
As Grace gets more entwined with the twins’ story, memories of her own mental instability, and that of her mother – whose death left Grace with a debilitating financial burden – start to cloud her objectivity.
We start to recognize female doubling deliberately happening all over the film, making its title extend beyond Angelique and Annabelle; and the actualization of this psychic mirroring will occur in the climactic scene at Dr. Lacan’s Institute, where Grace is re-appropriated as Angelique’s other half in a dream-like surgical sequence.
Lacan wants to kill Annabelle all over again, as a means of cementing his bond with Angelique (“Let’s share our guilt and be together again.”)
But Angelique doesn’t want to share her guilt with Lacan – she wants to share it with Grace, her new sister.
While De Palma’s film had its experiments partially set at the fictional Loisel Institute in Quebec, Buck’s film goes further (albeit unconsciously) in exploring the implications of this French-Canadian connection.
Canada has a well-documented history with non-consensual human experimentation, most notably with its part in the MKULTRA brainwashing program at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute (see review of Psycho Girls elsewhere in this appendix as well as Part 4: Secret Ceremonies for more details), but in the case of Buck’s Sisters, the emphasis on Lacan’s experiments also points to the Duplessis Orphans – a program in which Quebec Premiere Maurice Duplessis authorized the certification of thousands of orphans (most of whom were not even orphans, but were taken away from unwed mothers) as mentally ill, in a scheme to secure Federal funding to (a) support their daily existence and (b) justify ‘psychological’ experiments on them.
As such, from the 1940s through the 1960s, thousands of innocent children were subjected to electroshock and other medical horrors (not to mention sexual abuse), including fatal experiments that resulted in unmarked mass graves that are still being discovered across Quebec to this day.
Of course, in Buck’s version, the twins are not French-Canadian, they are from France (largely to accommodate the casting of Lou Doillon), so this connection is not deliberate, but it is an uncanny thread that runs from one film to the next.
And coincidentally, Doug Buck has resided in Montreal, since 2005.
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