Like Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim, Dominik Graf's film Beloved Sisters tells a story of a decades-long love triangle over a backdrop of European turmoil. Beloved Sisters takes its characters from history, but the story is not one of definite record, it’s a story that has long been inferred and speculated on, starring the poet Friedrich Schiller (Florian Stetter), his wife, Charlotte von Lengefield (Henriette Confurius), and her sister, and Schiller’s eventual biographer, Caroline von Beulwitz (Hannah Herzsprung).
In the late eighteenth century, Charlotte and Caroline are sisters in an aristocratic family that has lost most of its wealth following its patriarch’s death, yet is still trying to maintain the façade of nobility. Their mother (Claudia Messner) urges marriages of advantage; Caroline is unhappily married to von Beulwitz (Andreas Pietschmann), described as an “evil elephant,” and Charlotte has been sent to court to hopefully find a husband of her own. But her heart doesn’t lead her to a wealthy man, it leads her to Schiller, living in exile and notorious as a revolutionary for his play The Robbers, and like most poets and playwrights, broke. Schiller, both a forward thinker led by Enlightenment ideals and a romantic in temperament, is irresistibly exciting not just to Charlotte, but also to her more intellectual sister Caroline. This would lead to poisonous jealousy in most families, but Caroline and Charlotte are not just close, they're intertwined, and have made a vow to share everything without exception – even Schiller.
The trappings of the traditional period costume drama sets expectations of a conservative narrative that are completely thwarted by this frank exploration of a relationship that would be strikingly unconventional today, and simply unthinkable at the time. The three eventually decide that Schiller and Charlotte should marry to provide the illusion of respectability, but they continue to whole-heartedly pursue an equal and open ménage à trois. Director Graf belies the staid aesthetic of the costume drama in other ways as well, staging inventive portrayals of letter exchanges and a more immediate camera style that favors close-ups over the genre’s typical scenery-stressing wide shots.
Despite its length, the film keeps a quick pace, shifting from a tone of romantic abandon at the triangle’s onset, to a more elegiac and meditative tone as the trio age and grow apart, starting separate families amidst a feud by the formerly inseparable sisters. Schiller is brought to life as a man of great intellectual strength, but dreamy and physically frail. His idealism fuels the utopian thinking of the trio’s endeavor, but the two sisters are arguably the more complicated and compelling characters. Caroline is a brilliant woman trapped in a suffocating marriage, whose grasps for fulfillment grow more desperate as she grows unhappier while Charlotte is simpler in her ambitions and devotions, but far from naïve as she absorbs the events around her.
The realities of life interfere in even the most conventional of relationships and this defiantly unconventional one cannot sustain its fervent pitch over the course of decades, but its passion touches all three in life-altering ways. Beloved Sisters is an epic period romance progressive in both thinking and form, told with equal parts intellect and emotion.
