Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

And yet Marianne is by far the most interesting film this critic had the pleasure of seeing at the festival, and perhaps the most interesting one his editors have ever assigned him to review (though Death Slash 8 did, to be fair, have its moments). Many films try to convey the experience of being trapped in one’s hometown. I’m still waiting for the movie that shows everyone what it feels like when your mom comes home every night with another part of her body ruined from her job — first her back, then her eyes, then the hands that spanked and comforted you as a child — and your dad, already ruined long before, lectures you from the couch every night on the importance of the education that he never got and that he has no idea how to pay for, and all your friends cut class to smoke pot and talk about dreams heart-wrenchingly out of step with anything the world will ever allow them. Marianne doesn’t hit all these notes (eager viewers will have to wait for this critic’s screenplay to be picked up, an event surely in the offing), but the way the camera crowds Marianne in her family’s tiny house captures the hemmed-in, desperate feeling underlying them better than any film I’ve seen.

My editors at the august Daily Mongoose have recently requested that my writing be less “personal.” I do not think this is an objection to personal writing per se, as a colleague’s account of her (admittedly tragic and ultimately lost) battle with acne was met with great praise. I think it is an objection to the substance of my personal anecdotes, and thus to my life. Given this I will refrain from discussing at length how Marianne captures another aspect of small-town misery: the impossibility of escape. Being followed by a murderer from your past isn’t quite the same as having the undeniable luck to win an academic scholarship, then arriving at college to find that everyone there has had the same set of four experiences, none of which are yours, and that when you try to talk about any of your experiences you are met with either suspicion or horror and exhorted to “lighten up.” These topics are perhaps beyond the scope of Marianne , but later readers of my collected works (no doubt forthcoming within the next ten or twenty years, depending on the velocity of my rise) may find them revealing as an illustration of my perspective. In any case, leaving aside those matters apparently out of place in a paper of the Mongoose ’s stature, I will say merely that Marianne accomplishes the difficult feat of conveying deep emotion by means not generally considered emotional: the framing of a shot, for instance, or the blocking of actors in a scene. The film’s themes arise organically from the visual, rather than being forced upon the viewer through melodramatic dialogue or sentimental acting, as in many films that I could name but will not, since I already know I differ with many of my readers (and, indeed, my editors) in my opinion of them.

In an effort to make my film reviews more conventional, I have been asked to award films “stars.” I have been told that the number of stars I assign will be printed in the paper, no questions asked. I award Marianne 3,468,994.2 stars. Note to copy desk: Please print this exact number of stars or I will be forced to conclude that the Mongoose editorial staff not only has no regard for accuracy but may not be able to count above ten.

Editor’s note:

SOPHIE RAISED ME, KIND OF. WE RAISED EACH OTHER. OUR DAD was dead, and our mom was just young and sad and indecisive, and one day she was into Amway and the next day she was into Jesus, and she was never that into us. Sophie taught me how to read and how to draw and how to crouch quietly in the grass behind the drugstore and spy on people, like teenagers making out and our third-grade teacher crying and once our mom looking at photos of a man we didn’t know with an expression we’d never seen before. I taught her how to boil a hot dog and clean a cut and talk to grown-ups to get out of being in trouble — she never got good at the last one, so a lot of times I had to do it for her.

That makes it sound like we were best friends, and we were, but also she did all kinds of things I didn’t understand. She was terrible at school — she didn’t care about pleasing the teachers, and she didn’t care about fitting in, and when she was in eighth grade, she started wearing the same men’s black button-down shirt as a dress every single day, with a leather belt around the middle and boxer shorts underneath. The other kids called her “Crazy Emily”—she was still plain old Emily Buckley then, after our grandma — but she didn’t seem to care. I was in sixth grade then, and I’m embarrassed to admit I tried to pretend I didn’t know her; I even made fun of her when my friends did, though not as harshly and not when she was around to hear. It didn’t work — the school was small, and everybody already knew we were brother and sister. Even if they hadn’t, it was obvious: She and I had the same black hair and sharp faces, the same everything, except her eyes were even bigger than mine. So I tried to convince her to act more like a normal kid. It didn’t work, until the eighth grade when boys started throwing chocolate milk and mushy strawberries at her, and even then her only concession was buying some girls’ jeans.

In high school she started trying a lot of different things — one week she went running every morning wearing her crappy black sneakers and twisted her ankle so hard she limped for a month. After that she started smoking weed — I’d find her in her room red-eyed, petting the wall. Then she tried other drugs, ones I didn’t know. She started coming home covered in sweat, her pupils pinpricked, and once she drew tiny figures all over her bedspread in permanent ink, men and women with their faces all turned up like they were staring at the sun. She still didn’t have any friends at school, but there were rumors about her — about girls, about boys, about older men I was sure she’d never have anything to do with, as much as I could ever be sure about her. Twice she stayed out all night and wouldn’t tell me where she’d been. Once I caught her outside the drugstore begging for spare change.

When she was seventeen, she said she wasn’t going to college. She said she was going to move to Chicago and draw portraits of people on the street for money. Maybe I should’ve let her do it. I don’t know if she was happy then, but she had this kind of drive in her, and maybe if I’d just let her go, it would’ve pushed her in the right direction. But a family has to have one practical person, and I wanted my sister to have a nice life. Also, even though she still embarrassed me at school, part of me was proud of her. I thought she was a genius, and I thought no one had seen it yet, and I wanted them to see.

So I convinced her to take the SAT, and then I found some colleges that didn’t seem to care that much how you scored on it. I filled out the application for her. I said I (Emily) was an avid artist and also president of the French club (which we didn’t have) and a volunteer at the senior center (it was true that she’d been a big hit on our high school’s trip there, because she’d been willing to sit silently and listen to the old people for hours). I said my goal in life was to help people through art. My sister’s only contribution was in the “nicknames” field, where she wrote “Sophie Stark.”

“I’m changing my name,” she said.

I asked her why.

She shrugged. “Do I look like an Emily to you?”

I had to admit that she didn’t. I sent her applications off, and in the spring she got into Drucker, a liberal-arts college in eastern Iowa, about a hundred miles from our town. Mom had a party with scented candles and hard cookies shaped like fish, and it was just the three of us plus a lady from her church, and then one day late in August my sister was gone, and there we were in the house by ourselves.