Movie Blog: 'Beloved Sisters' Review
To call Beloved Sisters a romantic, historical epic about a threesome with a German poet is wrong. While the scenes are set gorgeously, with meticulously detailed costumes and props, and the story centers on a possible three-way in the love life of the monumental Friedrich Schiller, there lacks a certain something when the characters' passions flare up and fists meet the table. The silverware rattles, but not much else.
The problem lies in an absence of focus, which isn't helped by the film being nearly three hours long. Writer/director Dominik Graf goes through considerable effort early on, employing more narration than is usually bearable, to set up the story, yet the ball hardly gets rolling. The film weaves from the late 1700s to the early 1800s, introducing new characters and places, historical events and shades of romance, but somehow the drama never descends down a path that provides real emotional g-force.
In other words, the film is amazingly tame for being about a ménage à trois. In fact, the sexual side of the three-way is hardly ever explored. This is not a criticism, per se, but Graf doesn't have too many events with this relationship – which is just speculative, historically – out of which to make a romance with a pulse. Maybe he was just too cautious, considering the subject matter, of being melodramatic. But in avoiding that threat, the film became too opaque, ambiguous in a bad way.
Still, it's not all bad. Not for nothing is Beloved Sisters the German entry for the best foreign film Oscar. The performances of Hannah Herzsprung and Henriette Confurius, who play the sisters Caroline and Charlotte von Lengefeld respectively, are, at times, pretty impressive. Herzsprung is especially good in her twitchy portrait of the nervous and demanding Caroline, a writer whom the poet eventually grooms to page-turner stardom. Speaking of him, Florian Stetter nails the Schiller hat trick of appearing charismatic, sickly and self-obsessed. Confurius, who plays the submissive Charlotte, has the truly unforgettable eyes of a cat. All three are good, but they don't make the film great.
Maybe if the work was cut up and serialized for Netflix or Amazon it'd play better. That way each episode could focus on or highlight certain aspects of the love triangle, Schiller's contribution to German culture, or the political upheaval happening as part of the post-Enlightenment era. As the film stands now, it feels more like a pageant. People are in elaborate costumes, a bunch of stuff is happening, but it leaves one cool to the touch.
Beloved Sisters is playing at the Lagoon Cinema.
