Dominik Graf’s wonderfully rich film about the writer Schiller’s romantic entanglements is as unconventional as the relationships it portrays.

In 1788, the 29-year-old writer and scholar Friedrich Schiller (Florian Stetter), banished from his native Württemberg for his Enlightenment sympathies and revolutionary first play The Robbers, meets the beautiful von Lengenfeld sisters. First Charlotte (Henriette Confurius), whose naivety and gentleness mask an honesty and stubbornness which make her a difficult match in the Weimar marriage market. Then the older, more assertive Caroline (Hannah Herzsprung), who has sacrificed herself to a wealthy but cold husband, thus allowing her sister and widowed mother to maintain some semblance of gentility. Schiller is as captivated by the sisters as they are by him. They spend a glorious summer together in the countryside round the von Langenfelds’ home in Rudolstadt, and Caroline, already tiring of married life, hatches a plan whereby she and Charlotte can ‘share’ the brilliant and handsome young author. He and Charlotte will marry, and Caroline, once divorced, will come to live with them in Weimar. Before that can happen, the trio have to overcome Schiller’s radical reputation, his continuing attachment to his long-time mistress Charlotte von Kalb, and the concerns of the sisters’ traditionally-minded mother about his poverty and lack of pedigree – not to mention Caroline’s own, mysteriously abrupt hesitance, which gives the first hint of the amorous difficulties the three of them will face in the future.

“Graf attempts to get inside the spirit of the age…”

Dominik Graf’s BELOVED SISTERS is an impressive achievement, likely to reward repeated viewings. Its surface pleasures are considerable, and to a great extent it can be enjoyed both as an emotionally complex love triangle between three beautiful people, and as a series of exquisitely rendered period interiors. Behind these brilliant trappings, however, Graf attempts to get inside the spirit of the age — to give a sense of the ferment of ideas in pre-revolutionary Europe, and to map the mores and manners of its people. Key to this is the film’s fascination with the mechanics of communication. Appropriately enough, given Schiller’s position as one of Germany’s greatest writers, much emphasis is given to printing. The film lovingly recreates Cotta’s pressworks in Tübingen, where Schiller’s literary journal Die Horen was produced, and where Schiller and Caroline are shown reuniting after four years apart. It is within Die Horen that Caroline’s own literary work – a novel called Agnes von Lilien – is published in instalments. In an engaging sequence, Graf portrays its growing popularity by cutting between different groups of people all reciting passages from the book, waiting on tenterhooks for the following month’s episode, and wondering who the anonymous author may be.

More important still is the emphasis on the characters’ written correspondence. Letters of all sort pour out of the film, often delivered directly to camera by their authors. They appear as billets-doux, records of gossip, business transactions, announcements of news, physical evidence of an old love affair. They are spied on by third parties, written in code, forged, lost in carriage, dictated to an amanuensis. In the rigidly hierarchical society of the time, they are often the only way to talk directly to another person, especially for women — and the breakdown of a correspondence is time and again shown as a truly traumatic event.

“Where other films anachronistically second-guess the motivations of its characters, this treats its society’s inequalities as a given…”

It is in its treatment of the vulnerable position of women, especially when unmarried, that BELOVED SISTERS provides perhaps the greatest contrast with most recent films set in this period. Where others often anachronistically second-guess the motivations of its characters, this treats its society’s inequalities as a given, and shows the women working within the system to achieve their goals. After Schiller achieves his coveted position as a history professor at the University of Jena, for instance, Caroline and Charlotte are able to move freely around the male-only institution by dressing up as men.

For all the film’s many virtues, those seeking a conventional biographical tale may well be disconcerted by the apparently wilful choices Graf makes as director and writer. Most obviously, he provides the film with an omniscient but not always particularly informative narrator – voiced by Graf himself – who confers a (possibly spurious) authority as well as acting as one of the film’s series of distancing devices, which also include the eclectic musical soundtrack and colourful, if slightly grungy, titles that occasionally bounce around the screen. Perhaps in keeping with Schiller’s observation in the film — that literature allows inconsistency — Graf allows himself a very wide variety of stylistic effects. In one arresting sequence, he represents the repercussions of the French Revolution (which Schiller at first supported, then came to regret); first as an expressionistic splash of blood over cobblestones; then as a series of haunted portraits of the film’s aristocratic characters.

“As Charlotte says at one point, ‘In our family all our emotions are out in the open’…”

Within this ironised set-up, Graf gives his cast the space to produce marvellously vivid and naturalistic performances. The film has a very strong sense of what the Germans call Gefühl — a little more than ‘feelings’, a little less than ‘sentimentality’. The characters often appear to be on the edge of tears. As Charlotte says at one point, ‘In our family all our emotions are out in the open’. The female characters come across as particularly full-blooded, not merely Herzsprung and Confurius as the sisters, but Claudia Messner as their worldly, solicitous mother and Maja Maranow as the mysterious Frau von Stein, Charlotte’s would-be mentor and the on-off mistress of the greatest German writer of the period, Goethe. (In an amusing conceit by Graf, Goethe, as befits German literature’s éminence grise, is only ever shown from behind).

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