‘Sister’ takes on class and equality

THE GAP BETWEEN the 1 percent and 99 percent is also on the minds of Europeans, if the engrossing "Sister" is any measure of things.

Ursula Meier's new movie introduces us to a poor and virtually orphaned French boy named Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein) living in the Swiss alps, where he makes a daily trip from a shabby valley apartment to the alpine ski resort where he steals expensive equipment from the swells above the clouds.

Little Simon is the kind of kid you intuitively like - a thief, yes, but a hardworking one, stealing equipment to order, remodeling the "merchandise" to give a lived-in look that makes the stuff more marketable to his cash-strapped friends.

And there's something else, too. His outward bravado and apparent confidence conceal a deep vulnerability and an unexpected selflessness.

Simon lives in the shabby flat with his wayward unemployed sister, Louise (Lea Seydoux). Most of his money goes to fund what she says is her job search, but we the viewer it see as a means to get to the next party, the next boyfriend.

She disappears sometimes for days, and we are left to follow little Simon up the incline to the resort, as "Sister" makes the metaphoric most of the vertiginous relationship between the lucky few in the stratosphere and the rest of humanity down below.

"Sister" is loose and episodic, but held together with nicely sketched characters. Up top, Simon strikes up a partnership with an Irish resort worker (Martin Compston) and develops a strange fixation on a wealthy American woman (Gillian Anderson), pretending to be a big-shot rich kid and offering to buy her lunch.

It's a funny little scene that becomes a far richer and more powerful one on reflection, after the movie makes plain its narrative undercurrents. It's at this point that we see what a clever job Seydoux has been doing as well.

In the end, we understand Simon as a distant European cousin to little Hushpuppy in "Beasts of the Southern Wild," or Katniss Everdeen of "The Hunger Games" - children, looking out for themselves in a world that's forgotten how to look after them.

Contact movie critic Gary Thompson at 215-854-5992 or thompsg@phillynews.com. Read his blog at philly.com/KeepItReel.