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Her Name is Sabine

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by Meghan Horvath
Her Name Is Sabine is French actress Sandrine Bonnaire’s beautiful portrait of her younger sister Sabine who, at 28, was institutionalized for five years. Ten years later Sabine has only recently been properly diagnosed as autistic and has finally found the care that she needs to begin to live more fully, though the film, being a visual dossier of sorts, reveals that life for Sabine might never be exactly the same.         

Bonnaire organises the story of her sister around her daily life at a care home in France, a home that Bonnaire had been instrumental in getting off the ground after becoming aware of the lack of facilities available. But what makes this film so powerful - what moves it beyond being simply an observational documentary following Sabine through her day-to-day life - are the home movies of Sabine incorporated throughout the film.

The home movies show Sabine as a vivacious young woman –swimming, playing the piano, dancing, even taking a trip with her older sister to New York via the Concorde. Sabine appears happy and independent. Bonnaire narrates these portions of the film with her own memories of Sabine rather than calling attention to the way her younger sister has changed. The juxtapositions of the images speak for themselves.  One can tell from the drastic changes in Sabine’s posture and her gait that the period she spent in the institution has taken something, perhaps irrevocably. 
Her Name Is Sabine is a striking example of a very personal film with wider social implications. It is easy to find a way into this story as it considers bigger themes of family, responsibility and guilt. It's a film about many things, one of the most powerful of which is the act of remembering, as Sabine began to lose her memory while institutionalized. Through the home movies Bonnaire shot of her younger sister, Bonnaire is not only remembering her sister during a more innocent and carefree time, she is also re-introducing Sabine to this younger version of herself.  In one scene in the documentary Bonnaire plays the home movies of their trip to New York on a big television for her sister, and Sabine begins to cry what she calls ‘tears of joy.’  

There is a sense that Her Name Is Sabine is not finished and that there could well be another chapter to Sabine’s life and to the relationship between the sisters. Perhaps it’s because Bonnaire ends the film with a series of questions, speculating about whether the damage of the institutionalisation can ever be repaired, whether Sabine will be able to live without her and whether she will ever be able to take another trip with her little sister.

Directed by Sandrine Bonnaire, France 2008, 85 mins

Her Name is Sabine is released at the ICA this Friday, 20th June 2008.

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