'The Other Sister' is genuinely..........okay. It has its strengths and its weaknesses, but they sort of balance out in the end to be 'okay'. The performances are uniformly very good, and that is the movie's greatest asset. It is also very sympathetic towards Carla and very reflective of any young woman's desire to get out from under the thumb of a over-bearing mother. You don't have to be mentally challenged to know what that's like! It is also, however, perhaps overly sappy, simplistic in plot and self-consciously PC. Not that PC. movies are necessarily always bad, but when a movie is self-concious about being so, it can occasionally feel vaguely stilted- which 'The Other Sister' does. The sappiness comes from the love story angle. I think I would have preferred if the story simply stayed with Carla in her simple, honest attempts to become part of every day society, rather than becoming a romantic comedy with some rather off-putting aspects to it. Juliette's performance is pure enough to have carried the film without her having a love interest, and while I like Giovanni and his performance was very good, he is not quite the natural that Juliette is. Diane Keaton is every over-protective mother trying to spare her daughter the cruelty of the world, and 'The Other Sister' oddly forebears 'The Virgin Suicides' in the message that parents cannot shield their children from life or death. That film toasts this one in virtually every way, but since 'The Other Sister'- while largely mediocre- had the ambition to try addressing the issues facing mentally-challenged young women as they try to navigate life, I'm giving it points for effort- and for the good performances.
Review of The Other Sister
