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Weird sisters have been spinning their witchy webs in stories dating back to Greek mythology, which included a macabre trio of sisters who passed a single eye between them. There is something of that sense of a closed circle of unknowable femininity between the two teenage girls in September Says, the first film to be directed by Greek Weird Wave actor Ariane Labed, based on the 2020 novel Sisters by Daisy Johnson and set between England and Ireland.
July (Mia Tharia) is timid, a new girl at the high school where her sister September (Pascale Kann) is already marked as unruly, aggressive and peculiar, inclined to bullying; she will appoint herself as her sister’s protector. July is relieved to hang back, even when there is a hint that her sister’s control-freakery may include commanding the weather. There is a whiff of the witch about her, too.
The two girls are of Indian extraction, which means some of the routine insults they get stuck on their lockers are racist. It’s random racism, however: if their ethnicity weren’t such an easy target the kids would find some other way of needling them. They disturb routine order simply by being themselves. September’s decision to sort out the class queen who sits in front of her by cutting off her pony-tail isn’t going to make them any more popular, but it gives her satisfaction.
Carrie is a guiding spirit here; while the ages of the two girls are a sort of side-mystery, they are crucially both on the brink of sexual maturity. There are no scenes of bloody telekinesis – that would be very counter to Labed’s arch, deliberately stilted narrative style – but there is a sense of epochal change when July starts getting text messages she wants to hide from her sister, even more so when she agrees to go out with a boy she meets on the beach on holiday in a gray Irish seaside town. Labed has a distanced, even offhand relationship with her characters, but you can certainly feel the way a new crackle of sexual energy threatens to smite the girls’ dyad down the middle.
Not a minute too soon, one might think. We first meet them being dressed and posed as the twins in The Shining by their mother Sheela (Rakhee Thakrar), an elegant photographer. Their father has recently died but is barely mentioned, their mother flailing ineffectually against the daily demands of being the adult in the room. When September behaves monstrously, her response is to string a sheet over the couch to form a tent where the three of them can snuggle, withdrawing further from the world than ever. Sheela doesn’t seem to notice her girls’ elaborate rituals of dominance and submission, such as the exchanges where September demands things like “If I had to have a limb amputated, would you do it too?” (The only correct answer, obviously, is “yes.”) Sheela certainly wouldn’t know what to do about it.
And perhaps wouldn’t think she should. Sheela believes in her children’s ability to invent their own lives. On holiday, she announces she needs time on her own, goes to the pub and picks up a local farmer – who is dazzled by this whisky-drinking glamourpuss – for some restorative sex. Suddenly, we are inside her head; both she and the film leave the girls behind as her internal voice becomes audible, providing a running commentary on her hook-up’s activities at the other end of her body. It is funny and odd in a style reminiscent of the films in which Labed cut her teeth as an actor, not least those of her husband Yorgos Lanthimos. September Says is surprisingly slow, given these antecedents; it is only intermittently that it flares into the properly strange.
Of course, Labed is setting her own course. The high-school scenes ensure, for example, that there is more sense here of being tethered to the real world than there is in any of Lanthimos’ dystopias. Given that level of ordinariness, we ask ourselves what kind of future these girls could possibly forge outside their hothouse of mutual dependence. That question is implicitly answered at the end of the film in a single dramatic twist.
That moment is predictable, but still disappointing. The family predicament, which was tantalizing when only half explained, turns out to be sad but familiar, the sisters apparently not so weird after all. There are flashes in September Says of truly original accomplishment, but the tussle between July and September doesn’t amount to more than a summer fling.
Title: September Says
Festival: Cannes (Un Certain Regard)
Sales Agent: The Match Factory
Director-screenwriter: Ariane Labed
Cast: Mia Tharia, Pascale Kann, Rakhee Thakrar
Running time: 1 hr 38 min
