SMS --NYTimes, June 18, 1995

[Katy]

Dusting, Shopping, Cooking, Scrubbing, Ironing, Killing
By JUSTINE ELIAS

SOME MONTHS BEFORE the French maids Christine and Lea Papin butchered their
employers in 1933, the sisters set aside a few francs from their modest earnings
to buy themselves something special. Wearing their Sunday best, they visited a
photographer's studio in the provincial town of Le Mans and posed for a
portrait.

"Sister My Sister," a modestly budgeted British suspense film that opens on
Friday, is the story of what came before and after that photograph. Julie
Walters plays a well-to-do society matron who is satisfied with the work of the
sisters (played by Joely Richardson and Jodhi May), until she realizes that an
incestuous affair is pushing the sisters out of her control.

Two New Yorkers are part of the creative force behind the film, which was
screened this month as part of the New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. It
was adapted by the playwright Wendy Kesselman from her own work and directed by
Nancy Meckler, a Long Island native who has been a theater director in London
for 20 years. With Norma Heyman as producer, "Sister My Sister" is thus the work
of an all-female team.

For the writer, it was always the photograph of the sisters, solemn and alike
as twins, that stirred her imagination. "I saw that picture, and my face went
absolutely white," said Ms. Kesselman, who first read of the crime in a book of
essays by Janet Flanner, a New Yorker correspondent. "I was immersed in it,
obsessed. At the time, a psychiatrist called Christine and Lea a psychological
couple. That was one of the things that drew me into the story, the complete
merging of identities."

Ms. Kesselman, who lives part of each year in France, wasn't alone in her
quest to understand the crime; Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan tried to find
the meaning of the murders, as did Jean Genet, obliquely, in his play "The
Maids." Since Genet's work is so well known, was it presumptuous of Ms.
Kesselman to take on one of his most famous subjects? Ms. Kesselman, whose only
previous work for the stage had been a musical for children, says she was too
intrigued to be intimidated. "Many, many people in the theater said, 'How dare
you?' " she said. "But nothing could have stopped me from writing the play."

In the 1930's, the murders were seen as an uprising by servants against their
masters. But Ms. Kesselman never felt that the sisters wanted to displace their
wealthy employers, the Lancelin family, who led a dreary, circumscribed life.
With the court records sealed until the year 2033, Ms. Kesselman relied on the
gruesome details reported in the French newspapers.

The story begins one bitter February evening, when Madame Lancelin and her
27-year-old daughter returned from shopping to find the house in darkness. It
was the third time that a faulty iron had blown a fuse. Madame Lancelin, who
liked to put on white gloves to check for dust on the bannister and who had once
shoved Lea to the floor to make her pick up a discarded candy wrapper, was
displeased. She and her daughter confronted the sisters on an upstairs landing,
and the argument turned ugly.

In the end, the Lancelins were beaten to death, and the sisters finished the
job with kitchen tools. Most shocking was the condition of the bodies: the
victims were partly unclothed and mutilated, their eyes torn out.

When the police arrived they found Christine and Lea in bed, naked, clinging
to each other. Though the sisters never acknowledged in court that they had a
sexual relationship, Christine told her lawyers that she believed she had been
Lea's husband in a former life. Ms. Kesselman created her play around the idea
that the sisters' isolation led to sexual exploration, and later an obsessive
affair. Confronted by their employers, the sisters lashed out with lethal
results. (Christine was sentenced to death but died in an asylum. Lea was
released after 20 years in prison and went to work again as a maid, dying in
1982.)

Ms. Kessleman's play, "My Sister in This House," an intense 75-minute work
with no intermission, had an acclaimed run Off Broadway in 1981. In his review
for The New York Times, Frank Rich said it "begins as cool, black satire of
provincial bourgeois life, turns into a macabre tale of incestuous homosexual
love and ends with an explosion of Grand Guignol violence."

The play was first staged in London in 1987 by Ms. Meckler, who had an
established theater company in Hampstead and who is making her debut as a film
director in "Sister My Sister." Ms. Heyman, who had overseen such films as
"Dangerous Liaisons" and "The Summer House," was looking for a script with
strong female roles.

"I adored the play," she said. "I had read 'The Maids,' but I didn't know it
was based on a real case. Wendy's story is so different. It's much more what
could have happened. She has remarkable insight into the minds of these girls."

The men on the "Sister My Sister" crew, who watched the murder scenes over
five grueling days of shooting outside London, found the experience unnerving.
"Oh, the men on the crew got very quiet," said Ms. Heyman. "When Julie spat at
the maids, that really got them. They didn't believe a woman could be so
powerfully vindictive." Ms. Heyman said her male driver complained about the odd
atmosphere on the set, muttering: " 'Women, women everywhere. That's some
strange goings on up there.' Amazing, in this day and age. Would he say that
about men and 'Reservoir Dogs'?"

MS. KESSELMAN IS USED to extreme reactions to her script. "One woman said
that the playwright deserved the same fate as Madame and her daughter," she
said. But the most surprising reaction came from the residents of Le Mans, who
were eager to talk about the case, except one elderly man. He was the widower of
the Lancelins' oldest daughter, who was living away from home at the time of the
killings.

He finally invited ms. Kesselman into his house, where the crime occurred,
for a "very proper interview, in French," she said. When she asked why he
thought the maids were driven to murder, he leaped to his feet and shouted: "It
was the sex! The sex, you understand!"

Ms. Kesselman asked to see the maids' room, and the man dutifully gave her a
tour of the house. On the stairwell where the murder occurred, "he turned to me
and said, 'Une maison ordinaire, un crime extraordinaire,' " she said. "An
ordinary house, an extraordinary crime. And that really sums it up."

GRAPHIC: Photo: Joely Richardson in "Sister My Sister" -- The maids, as solemn
and alike as twins, were killers. (Seventh Art Releasing)