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.
Graf’s film is, on one level, a familiar tale of star-crossed lovers held apart by time, tide and the pestilent social climate of the era. But at every step, the filmmaker, who has an exceptionally acute sense of the relationship between the personal and the political, uses the push and pull of the characters as a window onto the unraveling social fabric of bourgeois European society. As revolutionary blood begins to spill in the streets of France, Schiller finds himself forced to reconsider his belief that “humanity will evolve through knowledge and the sight of true beauty.” And in scene after scene, Graf seamlessly inserts vivid details about a society in transition, from the modernization of printing techniques to the increase in literacy levels among the lower classes. Beloved Sisters was shot primarily on real locations, carefully augmented by production designer Claus Jurgen Pfeiffer to achieve historical accuracy. Barbara Grupp’s striking but never unduly lavish costumes, and co-composers Sven Rossenbach and Florian Van Volxem’s vibrato string score, are other standouts of a topnotch tech package. – Variety
“Think of it as Graf’s The Age of Innocence, a sumptuous phasing through the textures that entrap those unfit for times defined by emotional repression. See it when you most need it and this film might change your life.” – Scout Tafoya, RogerEbert.com
Set in Weimar in the fall of 1787.
Starring Hannah Herzsprung, Florian Stetter, Henriette Confurius, Claudia Messner, Ronald Zehrfeld, Maja Maranow, Michael Wittenborn, Andreas Pietschmann, Anne Schäfer, Peter Schneider, Eli Wasserscheid, Christine Zart, Ulrich Blöcher, Bernhard Conrad, Heinrich Cuipers, Ella Gaiser, Eva-Maria Hofmann, Thomas Kornack, Klaus Lehmann, Bennet Meyer.
In German with English subtitles.
Unrated.