Beloved Sisters
Director: Dominik Graf
Cast: Henriette Confurius, Florian Stetter, Claudia Messner, Hannah Herzsprung, Ronald Zehrfeld, Andreas Pietschmann
Rating: (M)
Three stars (out of five)
Now I have watched it, I feel a little bad as this is not much of a frock feast - though the period locations are every bit as splendid as hoped.
Instead we get a rather overheated love triangle between German literary lion Friedrich Schiller (Florian Stetter) and two sisters, one of whom he marries.
I have nothing against overheated love triangles - indeed it is hard to think of any other kind - but the historical evidence for this one seems to be a fragment of one letter, which is all that survives of Schiller's correspondence with Caroline (Henriette Confurius), his sister-in-law.
Director Dominik Graf brews a pretty rich stew from this one scrap but his drawn out plotting left me unconvinced.
Caroline and her younger sister Charlotte (Hannah Herzsprung) came from lesser nobility but the family was impoverished by the early death of their father.
To keep the family in the style to which they were accustomed Caroline was married to a wealthy man of the right class.
She was unhappy and to justify her sacrifice she wanted Charlotte to marry for love.
When Schiller showed an interest in Charlotte, Caroline found she loved him too.
They make a pact to share equally but a husband is harder to share than a piece of fruit as they discover at the cost of family relationships.
- Christine Powley
