25/05/2024 - CANNES 2024: Ariane Labed adapts Daisy Johnson’s coming-of-age novel Sisters into one of the year’s finest directorial debuts

l-r: Pascale Kann, Rakhee Thakrar and Mia Tharia in September Says

Ever since Ariane Labed debuted her first short as a director, we have been impatient to see her artistic vision take flight in a feature-length project. Five years after Olla premiered in the 2019 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Labed has been catapulted into a promising Un Certain Regard slot with September Says [+see also:
interview: Ariane Labed
film profile]. In accordance with her taste for offbeat roles (Attenberg [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Athina Rachel Tsangari
film profile], Flux Gourmet [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Peter Strickland
film profile], to name a few), her feature debut follows two sisters – 15-year-old July (Mia Tharia) and the slightly older September (Pascale Kann) – and their artist single mother, Sheela (Rakhee Thakrar). The girls play daring games that are often irresponsible, which drives their mum to her wits’ end, but no matter what, this trio stays strong: there is always cheese on toast to be had in a makeshift blanket fort, where the world is less of a threat to young girls with a mind of their own.

The Greek-French actress-director chose Daisy Johnson’s 2020 gothic novel Sisters as the primary source material for her feature-length debut, and no wonder, the two sharing an interest in controlling bonds and the complexities of female friendship. In Sisters and September Says, respectively, these themes play out between two siblings in a more dramatic – and cinematic – way. Balthazar Lab returns to shoot the film, as he did with Olla, joined by the masterful Bettina Böhler (a frequent collaborator of Christian Petzold’s), whose editing work is instrumental in creating the film’s inner rhythm and cooking up narrative surprises. They build a visual world for July and September’s tight-knit relationship out of wide angles and long shots, with the perfectly calibrated duration of each scene revealing just the right amount of information about the plot progression.

Labed is not interested in psychological portraits, but she is definitely drawn to ambivalent characters. Instead of delving into their psyche, she prefers to give them absolute freedom to express themselves: their actions and reactions are revealing enough. For example, July and September have set up an elaborate game whereby the latter dares (with the titular words, “September says…”) and the former has to obey. If not, she “loses a life”, as in a computer game. The prompts may vary (from eating a jar of mayonnaise to self-harm), but what they have in common is the lure of submission and the power inherent in control.

Both Tharia and Kann have to work with an endless supply of vulnerability to, first of all, make this relationship believable, and then to mop up the traces of their emotional investment in order to achieve that straight-faced delivery. It’s interesting how the world of September Says is not itself humourless and deadpan, but making it seem like one is part of the act the sisters put on. Their kinship is of the (very) knotty kind, and Labed is the ideal candidate to examine its ties and twists up close and, in the process, to deliver one of the finest debuts of the year.

September Says was produced by Ireland’s Sackville Film & TV Productions in co-production with Crybaby Films (UK) and MFP Gmbh (Germany). The Match Factory handles the film’s world sales.