Two adult sisters bond in quasi-incestuous intimacy after their mother’s death in Alexandra Roxo’s languorous femme-on-femme opus “Mary Marie.” Unfolding in a suspended, dreamlike state of resurrected childhood, the sisters’ enchanted summertime idyll is interrupted by the amorous attentions of a lanky country handyman (Tim Linden), and jealousy disturbs the siblings’ erotic symbiosis. Throughout this mainly plotless mood-piece, lenser Magela Crosignani’s palette of shifting textures and softly glowing colors creates a swoony aura that morphs according to its surroundings, from suffused daylight glancing off the grass to the smoky, bluish haze of a barroom dance floor. Striking-looking nanobudgeter could seduce niche arthouse auds.
Playing dress-up in their mother’s clothing, twirling with lighted sparklers at dusk, stealing pies off kitchen sills, sleeping and bathing together, and dancing cheek-to-cheek, Mary (Alana Kearns-Green) and Marie (helmer Roxo) move together encased in a kind of pre-Raphaelite time warp. Director Roxo’s fascination with retro stylings (she made a number of fashion videos) flowers in the hothouse ambiance of the dead mother’s house. Kearns-Green’s mannered blonde spaciness complements Roxo’s redheaded earthiness in a somewhat eerie manner, forecasting the murderous impulses that increasingly invade their realm.
