Canadian actress turned filmmaker Sarah Carter presents her debut feature, In Her Name, a black-and-white art drama/comedy. She wrote, directed, and produced the story of two estranged sisters forced to confront the past and each other as they come together to manage the affairs of their dying father. Sisters Freya (Erin Hammond) and Fiona (Ciera Danielle) live in the shadow of their eccentric, famous artist father, Marv (Phillipe Caland). They are all haunted by the memory of their mother and wife, played in flashbacks by Carter herself.
Marv lives in a luxurious estate populated with consorts, artists, writers, poets, and other bizarre hangers-on. The house functions like Warhol’s New York factory, where the usual constraints of polite society don’t apply, with Marv overlooking his menagerie like a rapidly declining Dr. Moreau.
Freya followed her father’s pattern in life, becoming an artist. Fiona is more buttoned up, having turned away from the art life swirl. She’s married but unhappy. Returning to the home where she grew up is jarring and brings up the many issues from her childhood that she thought she had successfully repressed. A writer named Peter (James Aaron Oliver) sets his sights on Fiona and tries to seduce her, adding to her confusion and discomfort. Marv responds violently to any discussion of what to do with the house and his estate in terms of end-of-life planning, with Fiona as the target of his rage.
There are hints of Serge Gainsbourg in the music and vibe of the film. As the drug-addled ambiance of the continuous party progresses, Fiona is seemingly re-initiated into the shared solipsism of this bizarre congregation. The visions and chaos swirl around her as she and Freya try to find some path forward for how to deal with their father now, and after he’s gone. Was his life truly art, or was it narcissistic self-indulgence? Will they take his legacy and make something meaningful of their own lives or follow him into nihilistic madness? Will they have a choice?
“…estranged sisters forced to confront the past and each other…“
With the availability of inexpensive digital color cameras, a filmmaker choosing black and white owes the audience a solid explanation of why that needs to be clear in the film itself. If the black-and-white aspect of the film isn’t a critical element for that particular story, then it comes off as faux-arty and pretentious. Whether Carter pulls this off is a question left to the viewer. She’s clearly calling back the best non-color films of the French New Wave, which is a bold comparison to make for a debut filmmaker. The composition of the shots and the movement does present a beautiful image, and the flow of the shots is elegant.
The performances are a delight to watch. Hammond, Danielle, and Calland provide three anchor points of the experience, and the real meaning of the film can be found in their dynamic. Danielle does the heavy lifting as Fiona, portraying the discomfort of someone coming back to a place and people she’d left behind.
This film is meant to make you feel before you think, and it achieves that goal. This requires a viewer to allow themselves to be lulled into the tone of the piece rather than trying to intellectualize what’s happening. The soundtrack of swinging jazz contributes to the overall texture and sets the stage for the wild party backdrop of the story. In Her Name has delightful moments of pure gold that rise above a scattered base layer of homage to an older film style.
"…delightful moments of pure gold"
