Beloved Sisters (2014)

Rushes along. Interesting times but doesn't settle into a rhythm. Don't like narration. Was the story based on fact? Didn't finish watching.

Two cuts of the movie that is. There is the shorter cinema version and the Directors cut, which obviously is longer. And therefor more conclusive, which also makes more sense than. If you only watched the shorter version you probably won't get that. Not that this means it's a sure thing you will like the longer version.One thing is for sure, there went a lot of thought into the design(s) of the movie. Again you might not like what you see, but the effort is there. Also our male lead has a way of speaking that fits more with a period piece like this than contemporary cinema. If you see it favorable you'll call it sophisticated. Acting in general is good, though not up to par with things Natalie Portman did of course. Still a refreshing look (with some artistic freedom/choices) back at time/history

Beloved Sisters is a Romantic epic about the failure of Romanticism. It needs its 138-minute sweep because it's a love story that parallels the sweep of modern history.From our current perspective Romanticism is splendid in literature, exhorting readers to huge ambitions, untrammelled individualism, unleashed emotions and the full embrace of natural. You can't complain about a movement that gave us Schiller, Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, John Lennon. But off the page and stage it can be bloody brutal. The Romantic ideals of the French Revolution soured into the anarchy, mob violence and slaughter that ensued. German Romanticism bred nationalism and we know how many lives that cost the world in 20th Century Europe and around the globe still today. The story of Schiller's passionate affair with two sisters replays those inevitable schisms on the domestic plane. In the ironic title, the sisters start out beloved — by Schiller but more importantly by each other — then end up antagonists. Their dying mother tries to reconcile them, to more disputatious result. Their passionate triangle left several marriages in ruin, even if they remained intact. The girls take a roaring waterfall as the emblem of their anti-conventional wills. Though Schiller can't swim he saves a little girl from drowning in a tamer current, but he has to be saved by one of the sisters and warmed back to life by both. The scene proves prophetic because all three lovers fail to navigate the tumultuous current of their pledged manage a trois. Nice place to visit, Romanticism, but it's hard to live there. Our need for social order and responsibility won't accommodate it.

To be fair, it was beautifully filmed, the landscapes, the colours, etc... everything was right and set to make a perfect film. The original music not so much, I like the fact they used Rameau's Zaïs overture for some scenes (just in case you were wondering what that was) but except that, the soundtrack was dull.Since we don't see so many German period dramas (unless you do count the every year film about the Nazis' era), it was worth at least to give it a chance; we watched this film with a friend as part of the annual German FILM FESTIVAL in Buenos Aires (otherwise this would have never even get to a DVD here): to say the least I fell asleep twice (maybe three times, I'm not sure), and that didn't affect the overall opinion I might have over the film or the story (if there was any), so did my friend, we were nudging each other in order to avoid falling sleep... and yet we both failed.It is too slow: nothing actually happens and when the film ends you do have the feeling you lost a lot of your time, the whole audience was trying to awake themselves by the end of it, I saw a lot of people yawning and there was an utter silence except for the relief most of them felt on leaving the room in order to get some coffee.This could have been an excellent story, the cast is great, the filming might almost get good but there is no story behind and that's the main trouble here. If you can, don't watch this on a cinema, do it at home, with a cup of coffee and consider the idea of pressing FAST FORWARD from time to time for it won't affect the final result.