PARTISAN REVIEW
277
nately through her eyes and as if we were in the room where the
murder takes place. One of a pair of separated Siamese twins,
DanieIIe or Dominique (Margot Kidder), is the apparent murderer.
Grace pursues the mystery of the sisters relentlessly, mainly to
prove herself right and the police wrong, only to become one of
the sisters herself in an hypnosis-induced nightmare near the end,
the ultimate voyeuristic trip. It is an extraordinary scene worth, as
they used to say in less inflationary times, the price of admission.
Sisters
explores the variations, metaphoric and mythic, of secret
connection among us. It is an academic film made up consciously
of ideas from
Psycho
and
Rear Window
and
Repulsion
and per–
haps even
Les Yeux sans Visage,
though satisfying on its own
terms and responsible for the associations it evokes. Like a number
of other young intellectual filmmakers, following to some extent
the example of the French new wave, De Palma makes movies in
homage to the movies that gave him pleasure as a member of that
audience in the dark.
Sisters
is also, by implication at least, a
fantasy about moviegoing. Like the Siamese twin, like the re–
porter-heroine, the audience of
Sisters
is made aware of itself as
implicated sharer in the secret life of another.
Serpico
Serpico,
directed by Sidney Lumet, is an apparent good cause
with a multimillion-dollar publicity budget behind it--curious
how the establishment loves to invest in ostensibly antiestablish–
ment work--and has been self-fulfillingly well received. It is a
movie about a true-life honest though eccentric cop in a den of
thieves known as the New York City police force. It is an episodic
work as biographical films tend to be, disconnected fragments of a
life. Although it has no pretensions to art, it has, I have to say on
the basis of my experience with it, equally small pretensions to
entertainment. Editorializing is its issue, its reason for being. The
hero, Frank Serpico, moves from one unit to another, surprised
and disgusted to discover that his colleagues are corrupt wherever
he turns; he becomes more alienated, his style grows more flam–
boyantly bohemian, he breaks off with one woman and moves in
with another, and so on. The scenes Lumet chooses to show us
have no more apparent significance than the ones he chooses to
