Superior takes us through the looking glass of women’s lifestyle choices.
Right away, Erin Vassilopoupous’s 16mm gem grabs your attention with exciting editing and perfectly composed shots, cutting back and forth between a high-stakes murder on a highway, and a homemaker cooking an egg.
Popping with color, costumes that sizzle, and juxtapositions that highlight the different ways of being a woman along with every comedic, thrilling, and desperate angle of navigating a man’s world that comes along with it, Superior plays with the notion of friction between the choices that women make and how they separate us from ourselves.
Haunted by a man she may have killed in self defense, cool rocker Marian shows up at responsible housewife Vivian’s home looking for a place to hide. In order not to wear out her welcome, she gets a job at a local ice cream shop run by a stoner teen, but her fear of being accosted by the man, who turns out to be her husband, overtakes her and, without telling her why, she convinces Vivian, her identical twin (the pair are played by real-life identical twins Alessandra and Ani Mesa), to switch places with her.
Like a retelling of the classic tale about a prince and a pauper, it turns out that they quite enjoy slipping into one another’s lives. Vivian delights in getting out of the house and interacting with people, and eventually finds a certain degree of creative freedom in ditching her everyday household responsibilities in favor of the carefree irresponsibility of smoking pot with her teenage coworkers. Marian, on the other hand, finds comfort in the daily routine of gardening and caring for houseplants and shopping for and preparing dinners, and uses the opportunity of having the house to herself to focus on her songwriting for her band, The Error.
As the twins catch up, it becomes increasingly and unbelievably clear how little the two know of each other as adults, and this separation becomes the film’s central mystery. The only common bond they seem to share into adulthood is ownership of a pair of queen conch seashells. Vivian was unpacking hers from storage in the film’s opening sequence, perhaps symbolically calling out to her sister in her time of desperation. As the film progresses and the sisters gain more and more perspective of one another’s circumstances, they grow closer, more like one another, and this distinction becomes fuzzier and fuzzier.
As the film crescendos towards the climax, a series of miscommunications leads to the sisters finding themselves in the clutches of their respective husbands, only reversed, and the two begin to truly appreciate the similarities in the bonds that have kept them trapped and apart in their separate lives. By the end of the film, they are indistinguishable from one another.
This film reaches out to the women who have experienced the lifestyles of both or either of these sisters, whether simultaneously or as chronological stages of a life, and to those who have been unimpressed by both or either kinds of men that appear as their husbands. With its title, never addressed in the film, it asks of us, which is the superior lifestyle? Are homemakers superior to rocker girls? Are men superior to women? Are people with jobs superior to those who don’t earn a paycheck? Superior hints at these questions without drawing any stark conclusions, allowing us only to guess at how our twin protagonists might feel about them while also allowing us, and them, to see each other through the mirror lenses of their own eyes.
Credit to Vassilopoulos and her production team in pulling together not only an effective cast but a talented crew, including director of photography Mia Cioffi Henry, editor Jen Ruff, production designer Maite Perez-Nievas, and costume designer Allison Pearce, whose contributions all shined in this low-budget, high-payoff thriller.
Superior premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday, January 30th, 2021 and plays again today, Monday, February 1.
