Beloved Sisters

Synopsis: A romance between two beautiful sisters and a famous poet in late-18th century Germany.

Beloved Sisters is very much what used to be classified as an art-house film. This is not just because being in German it is difficult for a non-German speaker to follow the wordy script, the sub-titles of which often blend into the images, but because some awareness of late-18th century German cultural history is necessary to appreciate its references whilst the film itself adopts an an almost theatricalized and highly decorative approach to its story,

That story is of the unconventional relationship between two aristocratic sisters, Caroline von Beulwitz (Hannah Herszsprung) and her younger sister, Charlotte von Lengefeld (Henriette Confurius), and the
poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright, Friedrich Schiller(Florian Stetter).  Charlotte marries Schiller but the three maintain an on-again-off-again relationship as the more intellectually Caroline blossoms into a highly popular author. The years go and  tension develops between the sisters, their youthful promise to share everything with each other being broken by love’s possessiveness.

The film’s closing narration leads us to understand that although there is a kernel of truth to the story what we see is pure speculation. To some extent this speculative imaging is both the film’s strength and weakness. On the one hand we have a meticulous production design and glorious visuals which beautifully portray the aristocratic society in which Schiller moved. On the other hand we have a film that is lavish on its visually seductive surface but light on dramatic depth. The main problem here is that the characters are insubstantial and there is little sense of their historical construction. Stetter is a handsome romantic hero but hardly strikes one as someone of great literary dedication, let alone of the late 18th century. Equally Henriette Confurius is beautiful to behold but it is hard to see her relationship with Schiller as, aside from the kinkiness, going much beyond a generic Mills and Boon notion of romance in high places of yesteryear. Herszsprung fares somewhat better as the plainer but more restive older sister locked in a loveless marriage of convenience. One can feel from her character the kind of intellectual force that would have appealed to a passionate advocate of Enlightenment ideas. If only more effort had been spent on developing the intellectual and psychological profiles of all three characters, this would have been a more satisfying film..

Language obstacles aside, Beloved Sisters is a high-class production that manages to be both historically detailed and historically imprecise at the same time and at 170 minutes we can be forgiven for thinking it fortunate that Schiller died at a mere 45 years of age from tuberculosis.

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