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Sister Smile
Score: 80%
Rating: Not Rated
Publisher: MVD Entertainment Group
Region: A
Media: DVD/1
Running Time: 95 Mins.
Genre: Foreign/Independent/Drama
Audio: Italian Stereo Sound
Subtitles: English

Features:
  • Two Award-Winning Short Films by Roger Deutsch
    • "Dead People" (2005, 18 min 34 sec)
    • "Mario Makes a Movie" (2004, 11 min 36 sec)

Wow, get your Art Haus glasses on and prepare for viewing! Sister Smile is a seriously twisted flick, in the spirit of the best absurdist and experimental cinema, that manages to walk a fine line between those forms and straight docu-drama. Even though it was produced in the last decade, Sister Smile (or Suir Sorriso), appears dated because of the choice of what looks like old 16mm film. Since the true events behind the life and death of the woman otherwise known as "The Singing Nun" took place in the '60s, there's a period-piece aspect to Sister Smile that carries through in its camera work and costumes. We get a sense of the key relationships in Sister Luc Gabriel's world, beginning with her Mother Superior and the convent where Sister Smile wrote the song that brought her fame. This is also shown as the trigger for her eventual decline into madness and death.

Yes, this isn't a family film, folks. When they say "tragic tale," they really mean it. There's rampant drug use, violence, and explicit sexuality, including plenty of full frontal nudity of the female persuasion. Everything about the life of Sister Smile is shown as completely miswired, leaving her with romantic entanglements rather than true relationships. The song she was famous for singing is a relatively small part of the story. We instead get much more to fill out the picture of her father, her lover, and the circle of nameless strangers that seduce and poison Sister Smile. Several dream sequences and dreamlike scenes show Director and Writer Roger Deutsch putting his own interpretation on the story of Sister Smile. Like any good surrealist vision, Deutsch's interpretations are open to interpretation. Saint or sinner, Sister Smile was clearly her own worst enemy - at least in this film, no one more than Sister Smile is bent on her own destruction.

Actress Ginevra Collona turns in a great performance as Sister Smile, proving herself completely untrustworthy and misdirected, and teetering on the edge of madness, while trying to convince herself and others that she is stable. Simona Caparrini and Antonio Salinas fill out the small cast, and spend the most time on-camera apart from Collona. It's an effective compressed program at 95 minutes, and two other Deustch short films are included here, 2005's Dead People and 2004's Mario Makes a Movie. If you're a fan of independent film and enjoy a healthy dose of the surreal, Sister Smile is worth checking out. It's a story that certainly gives a clear vision to the idea of a fall from grace...



-Fridtjof, GameVortex Communications
AKA Matt Paddock
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