Kritiken

The two [lead] actresses navigate the emotional complexity of their roles with quicksilver intuition and what seems like near-bottomless empathy. They make the sisters full individual creations who are nevertheless inextricably bound to each other with the aim of (among other things) making it practically impossible for the viewer to choose a "side." It's more their doing than Graf's that one believes that Schiller could be entirely in love with both of the women.

[Graf] approaches the Schiller-Charlotte-Caroline triangle not as a ball-gown romance, but as a fast-moving genre piece, chock-full of abrupt zooms and whip-pans. While most films set in the period tend to get hung up on clothes—hence the term "costume drama"—Graf is focused on measures of time, and on evoking the spirit of social and private life in the age of letter-writing, horse-drawn travel, and candlelight.

Graf freshens the pretty period trappings with a headlong embrace of every old-fashioned detail: omniscient narration, characters directly addressing the camera, intertitles. Above all, he sticks to a leisurely pace that gives personalities time to breathe and develop.

Writer-director Dominik Graf, who's worked primarily in television, has concluded, or at least opted to imagine, that the three engaged in a tempestuous ménage à trois, and his handsomely mounted, beautifully acted epic biopic (running just shy of three hours) succeeds in reducing the lives of three important figures in German literary history to a rather banal love triangle.

Beloved Sisters doesn't grovel in eventual heartache over its protracted running time—and perhaps due to that loses a little heft. It goes down easy, like high-grade comfort food. But with revolution in the air (both literal and sexual), the ache of the three leads is enough to sweep you up.

Beloved Sisters throws open the familiar, lavender scented embrace of the period drama. A pretty Wikipedia page, it wants to scrutinize the Personal Life and where necessary sketch a précis of the actual Life's Work.

If for Graf, the trio's attempts at finding a structure to house the many aspects of love and passion recall the ideals and alternative lifestyles of the Seventies, that extraordinarily contradictory period also engendered a cosmopolitan cinematic modernism that is echoed in his treatment of the material.

The filmmaking in Beloved Sisters is restless and aggressive, with floating title cards, a pervasive voiceover, and copious pans and tilts, dollies and zooms. Graf's movie feels most delightfully odd, though, in sequences that function as interludes... The bravado of these digressions reveals Graf's ambition while exposing the relative thinness of his movie's central plot: Charlotte and Caroline's sisterly love and its inevitable undoing are not sufficient anchors for a 170-minute opus.

Beloved Sisters is a period film that never once breaks the illusion of its genre-based dramatic romance—except, hilariously, in baldly tacky titles and title cards—for Graf is a filmmaker whose belief in the full expressiveness of popular cinematic languages and conventions is confirmed when you watch with what active intelligence his filmmaking is allowed to prickly explore, without rupture, the full range of his chosen story.

Beloved Sisters was exactly what I needed: a whirlwind defense of letting your emotions ruin everything magnificently. The characters in "Beloved Sisters" treat their romantic involvements with the same ugly dependence that the Safdie Brothers' characters treat booze and heroin. When every inch of you wants to cry and wail and moan for someone who can't return your love, in which direction do you run? That's the breed of inextinguishable ecstatic torment in which "Beloved Sisters traffics.

It's a film that is both romantic and Romantic: It depicts the passions between the characters as well as their passion for the eternal, for embracing life. Don't be intimidated by the length, either; it's a surprisingly brisk, absorbing film, shot and cut with the speed of a thriller.

Absorbing for most of its 170 minutes, the film is marred by Graf's creaky televisual, digital style; there's never a sense of the sumptuousness of the period, and Schiller himself often seems less like a learned poet than a hunky bystander.