Breaking Habits Review: The seriously weird mission of Sister Kate
BREAKING HABITS ★★★
M, 87 minutes
Sister Kate from the documentary Breaking Habits.
A group of women in white veils sits around a table in Merced County, California, clipping the dark green leaves of cannabis plants. Their leader, Sister Kate, camps out with the crop at harvest time, to stop armed robbers from stealing it. She carries a shotgun.
In voice-over, she tells the story of a young single mother who had just lost her job. She came running across the street to Sister Kate, exclaiming that she had was an alcoholic on her way to the liquor store when she saw her. She thought it was a sign from God. Sister Kate asked her if she had thought about the healing properties of marijuana.
''Wait. What kind of nun are you?'' she asked.
That’s a good question. It takes the film-maker Robert Ryan about 45 minutes to come back to it – and by then, we have taken a series of turns that no novelist would dream of trying to make credible. It’s more like a movie concept for the king of low-budget schlock, Roger Corman: ‘The Shotgun Nun’, or ‘The Doobie Sisters’.
If the first duty of a documentary maker is to show us something of the raw drama of life, the second is not to bore us. On that score, Breaking Habits is a success: this story is beyond ordinary weirdness. It’s stratospherically weird. Even for wacky California, these women are out there. The Sisters of the Valley grow what they claim is strictly medicinal marijuana which they refine into healing oils they sell around the world. The business turns over about $5 million a year, says Sister Kate.
Filmmaker Robert Ryan takes up the seriously weird story of the Sisters of the Valley.
The decriminalisation of marijuana in California means it is legal in Merced County for a person to have 12 plants on any one parcel of land. Sister Kate and her team appear to have at least 60 plants on the go, and they don’t have the relevant permit from the county authorities. Indeed, Sheriff Warnke, wearing one of his many western hats, his six-gun hanging on the hat stand behind him, says they are nothing but drug dealers and criminals and he will apply the law to them, nuns or not.
This fight forms the main spine of the story, but it is never quite clear what the legal situation is. Sister Kate’s application for a permit was knocked back by the local Board of Governors: old attitudes to drugs die hard at the local level.
In California’s Central Valley, the bread-basket of America, marijuana growing has long been a lucrative illegal business. Trying to make it legal upsets the gangsters, as well as the cops. Sister Kate is determined to shift the paradigm, forcing people in authority to recognise that cannabis can have immense healing and spiritual properties.
That’s why she wears the veil. It started as a joke, a recognition that this woman, real name Christine, was something of a crusader. Christine had been through some hard times: a husband who robbed her, a brother who betrayed her, a family that turned their backs on her and her children. The veil became a symbol of her sacred mission to heal herself. The next logical step was to create her own sisterhood – a feminist collective for the herb - or perhaps a way to keep the sheriff off her back. Christine is nothing if not canny.
This is where the film falls down. It’s not enough for Ryan just to show us the weirdness. He needed to stay longer, to answer some of the questions he raises, like whether Sister Kate is really just another California charlatan or a woman performing a real public service. Who are these other women who have joined her in the veil? How does she get away with 60 plants and no prosecution?
It’s widely accepted that medical marijuana can be good for cancer patients, even if it remains hard to get (at least in Australia). There is a serious side to this whole issue, not that we get much serious debate in the film.
Sister Kate/Christine uses a lot of her own product, so she’s not inclined to concede any nasty side effects of chronic marijuana use. And a woman who takes her own joke so literally might not be someone we should take entirely at face value.
Paul Byrnes was director of the Sydney Film Festival from 1989 to 1998. He has been a film critic for The Sydney Morning Herald for 20 years. In 2007, he was awarded the Geraldine Pascall prize for critical writing, the highest award in the Australian media for critics in any genre.