Beloved Sisters Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.0

Beloved Sisters Blu-ray Movie Review

Sister wives.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 14, 2015

There are some enduring mysteries surrounding some iconic historical male figures and the females who wandered through their lives at various stages. Musicologists, for example, have long debated about the existence of who the “Elise” of Beethoven’s immortal Für Elise was. (An alternative paper here in my hometown of Portland once had a very funny “cartoon” which probably only appealed to music geeks like myself. The top half had a double exposure of a man’s torso on top of which one of those plaster busts of Beethoven’s head had been superimposed, with the caption “Actual photograph of Beethoven.” Underneath was a photo of a stout little canine sleeping on one of those oval braided rugs, captioned with “Actual photograph of Beethoven’s dog, Elise.”) There’s not quite that level of intrigue with regard to another legendary German, poet-philosopher Friedrich Schiller, a man whose poem An die Freude provided the text for Beethoven’s anthemic finale to his Ninth Symphony, the monumental Ode to Joy. Schiller had a rather complicated and long running relationship with two sisters, Caroline and Charlotte von Lengefeld, ultimately marrying Charlotte while leaving sister-in-law Caroline free to write one of the best known biographies of Schiller. This convoluted ménage à trois provides the foundation for the unusually literate if probably overlong (at close to three hours) Beloved Sisters, a 2014 German film which was nominated for the Golden Bear at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival, as well as being proffered by Germany as its entry into last year’s Academy Award sweepstakes for Best Foreign Language Film (it didn’t make the cut for the short list of actual nominees). Sumptuously beautiful while also appealingly intelligent, Beloved Sisters provides a fascinating overview not just of Schiller’s life with these two women, but Germany’s own transformations as a nascent humanism began to overtake the Arts and, subsequently, society itself.

There are some stylistic choices that writer-director Dominik Graf employs which may be potentially off putting for some viewers, including a ubiquitous male narrator (according to the IMDb, Graf himself) who helps to bridge various narrative gaps as well as providing a bit of contextual background at times, though Graf's haphazard use of this approach generates at least a few questions along the way. Graf also uses a lot of silly, too contemporary looking, graphical elements that supposedly help to establish place and time at various junctures. Neither of these techniques is especially helpful in setting up a properly immersive feeling, since both tend to draw the viewer squarely out of the experiential angle into a kind of “meta” appreciation of what’s going on, rather than simply letting the story unfold organically without a lot of bells and whistles attending to events.

The film initially introduces Charlotte (Henriette Confurius), who goes by the nickname Lollo, and who has gotten a chance at bettering her station in life by living with her godmother, the well connected Frau von Stein (Maja Maranow). Frau von Stein is a member of court and Lollo is hopeful that she’ll be able to land a wealthy husband there, as it becomes clear her family is, if not in dire straits, at least not very well off. This is despite the fact that Lollo’s sister Caroline von Beulwitz (Hannah Hersprung) has married well (at least economically speaking) to the unctuous elder Friedrich von Beulwitz (Andreas Pietschmann).

In one of several peculiar elisions that are not really covered by narration, Caroline is ultimately invited to Frau von Stein’s as well, though by this point Charlotte has already met the dashing young poet Friedrich Schiller (Florian Stetter), actually inviting her godmother’s umbrage in the process since the two “met cute” when Charlotte began talking to Schiller one day from a parlor window after the poet became lost and started shouting for help. Soon enough Caroline is swept under the spell of Schiller, though there is a perplexing lack of sibling rivalry between the sisters for attentions from the young man.

Another rather strange unexplained segue occurs which finds the girls back with their mother (Claudia Messner), a once aristocratic woman who has seen her fortune dwindling to the point that she is forced to live in the “rear house” of a once vast estate. She’s therefore none too pleased that Charlotte is entranced by a “pauper,” as she so eloquently describes Schiller upon meeting him herself. The girls’ mother is even less thrilled that Caroline seems to be carrying a torch for Schiller, since it’s Caroline’s shaky marriage to von Beulwitz which has kept the wolf from the door so far.

If the film is curiously redacted during this “courtship” phase, it opens up somewhat into a more languorous exploration of the interrelationships between the three once Caroline “comes up” with the idea that Charlotte should simply marry Schiller to conform to societal morés, while Caroline will continue to stick around as something of a “sister wife” (literally in this case). It’s a really fascinating (and apparently historically accurate) element to the tale, but some who want their historical dramas more floridly presented may be disappointed in Beloved Sisters’ generally reverential tone.

The film does a good job of alluding to then prescient ideas like gender equality without ever tipping over into screed like tendencies. This plays out especially with regard to Caroline, who obviously has aspirations to be a writer, but who feels constrained to get feedback from Schiller himself before feeling able to completely devote herself to her preferred vocation. The stifling environments most women endured in that era are referred to, albeit sometimes rather hysterically, as in Frau von Stein’s somewhat tempestuous relationship with Schiller’s mentor Goethe.

Opulently appointed and rather sumptuously mounted, Beloved Sisters feels a bit too long for its own good, especially when Graf tends to assemble elements in a kind of crazy quilt fashion, sometimes using narration to explain what’s going on, but at other times simply leaving the viewer to fend for himself in establishing context and meaning. Performances are solid throughout, and the film’s physical production values are often stunning.

Beloved Sisters Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Beloved Sisters is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Music Box Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. Shot digitially with the Arri Alexa, Beloved Sisters looks appealingly sharp and well defined on Blu-ray, helped by a sumptuous palette which exploits hues like deep cerulean blues and verdant greens. Location work is often incredibly scenic, with director Dominik Graf and cinematographer Michael Wiesweb evocatively using light and natural elements like fog or mist to establish a suitably romantic ambience (see screenshot 6). They also have a tendency to shoot into light quite a bit of the time, resulting in slightly blooming whites and some clipped highlights (see screenshots 10 and 11 among others). Outdoor sequences offer excellent precision in items like tree leaves as well as offering nice depth of field. Some interior scenes, like the opening carriage ride for Charlotte, don't offer much in the way of shadow detail at times. Fine detail is often quite appealing, especially in close-ups, when the finely appointed costumes can reveal even individual thread patterns.

Beloved Sisters Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Beloved Sisters features a workmanlike lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix, largely in German, though with occasional forays into French (especially when Madame Lengefeld doesn't want the servants to know about their financial difficulties). Dialogue is presented cleanly and clearly, and several outdoor sequences offer good immersive use of ambient environmental effects. I was occasionally unimpressed with the odd and at times rather anachronistic score by Sven Rossenbach and Florian van Volxem, which is at certain points completely too contemporary sounding, utilizing things like synth washes for brief surges of music that go just as quickly as they come. Some of the more period appropriate sounding cues offer better support for the film's emotional ambience. One way or the other, the music sounds clear throughout the presentation and is well splayed throughout the surround channels.

Beloved Sisters Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Making of Beloved Sisters (1080p; 21:13) offers some good interviews, as well as behind the scenes footage and snippets from the completed film.

Beloved Sisters Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

For such a long film, Beloved Sisters is curiously discursive at times, offering elements as faits accomplis rather than properly detailing them. At other times, Graf is almost frighteningly picayune in detailing the lives of the sisters as they intersect with Schiller. This gives the film a somewhat unbalanced feeling at times, a tendency which is at least partially overcome by a sumptuous physical production and good all around performances. We may in fact never know who (or what) Elise was, but Beloved Sisters helps to elucidate, however clumsily at times, one of the most fascinating "three ways" in history. Technical merits are generally very strong on this release, and Beloved Sisters comes Recommended.