Plot
The aristocratic sisters Charlotte and Caroline both fall in love with the controversial young writer and hothead Friedrich Schiller. Defying the conventions of their time, the sisters ... See full summary »
Storyline
The aristocratic sisters Charlotte and Caroline both fall in love with the controversial young writer and hothead Friedrich Schiller. Defying the conventions of their time, the sisters decide to share their love with Schiller. What begins playfully, almost as a game among the three of them, soon turns serious as it leads to the end of a pact.
Cast: Hannah Herzsprung -
Caroline von Lengefeld
Florian Stetter -
Friedrich Schiller
Henriette Confurius -
Charlotte von Lengefeld
Claudia Messner -
Madame Louise von Lengefeld
Ronald Zehrfeld -
Wilhelm von Wolzogen
Maja Maranow -
Frau Charlotte von Stein
Michael Wittenborn -
Carl Ludwig von Knebel
Andreas Pietschmann -
Friedrich von Beulwitz
Anne Schäfer -
Charlotte von Kalb
Peter Schneider -
Christian Gottfried Körner
Eli Wasserscheid -
Schwenke
(as Elisabeth Wasserscheid)
Christine Zart -
Haushalterin Stein, Dienstmädchen bei den Steins
Ulrich Blöcher -
Johann Friedrich Cotta
Bernhard Conrad -
Arzt in Jena
Heinrich Cuipers -
Country: Germany, Austria, Switzerland
Language: German, French
Release Date: 31 July 2014
Filming Locations: Weimar, Thuringia, Germany
Technical Specs
Runtime:|
(festival)
Did You Know?
Trivia:
Germany's official submission to the Best Foreign Language Film category of the 87th Academy Awards 2015. See more »
User Review
Author:
Rating: 4/10
(note: I watched the short version, about 140 minutes, of this film)
Beautiful landscapes, beautiful interiors with subtle natural lighting,
beautiful actors and some beautiful moments don't save this film from
being a serious disappointment that may be tolerable on a TV screen,
but certainly not on a cinema screen.
Allegedly this is a story about passion, and early on in the film there
is a promising moment when Schiller, soaking wet and half-frozen after
rescuing a child out of a stream, is warmed up by the sisters clinging
to his body; this was quite erotic, but sadly it remained the only
erotic moment in the whole film. The director's approach to sensuality
and passion here is much too buttoned up; the result is bland and
soporific. You can't have women like Herzsprung and Confurius in such a
film and never have them undress; this is simply inexcusable.
I won't talk about the score here; the music is so irrelevant that it
doesn't even affect the film negatively. I'd like to talk about scenes:
Usually, a film, be it a Hollywood film or an art film, is made of
scenes; a succession of scenes, with each individual scene having a
beginning, an ending, a development in between, and a relation to the
preceding and to the following scenes.
Dominik Graf obviously doesn't believe in scenes. Take, for example,
the beginning of his film: First shot is a close-up of Confurius
sitting in a coach. I expected that I would get to know this character
now and that I would be guided into the world of the film. Well, I was
wrong. Suddenly an ugly voice-over starts explaining who this girl is
and what she is about to do. Then we cut to something else. So what
about the opening scene? There simply is no opening scene! This is
terrible. Imagine a writer writing a novel and not even getting his
first sentence right. The editing is terrible throughout. I remember at
one point there is a cut to a wide shot of a street, and about half a
second later there is another cut away to something else before we even
had time to appreciate what is going on in this street. Terrible.
However, the general problem concerning the editing is not that it is
too fast, but (and I don't know if the writer/director or the editor is
to blame for it) that the editor was incapable of giving the story a
compelling structure, a recognizable rhythm. Instead of a succession of
meaningful scenes we get an erratic tapestry of meaningless pretty
shots, and even if these shots group themselves to a kind of individual
scene from time to time, there is no weight behind it, no sense that
this scene had to start at exactly this point and had to end at exactly
that point. In contrast to the sad mess that "Die geliebten Schwestern"
is, you may want to have a look at Kubrick's "Lolita" (there may be
many other good examples, but this film comes to my mind right now as a
benchmark for masterful writing): Instead of trying to cram as many
scenes of Nabokov's novel as possible into the screenplay, they wrote
mainly long or very long unforgettable scenes, that give the actors
time to breathe and to unfold.
Bottom line: If you love the art of filmmaking and wan't to spare
yourself some serious frustration, I don't recommend this one.
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