German literature in
general, and German Romanticism in particular, is terra incognita to me (might have
something to do with coming of age in the immediate wake of two World Wars),
but chance has led me that way lately.
First there was an essay in the New Yorker that
asked the question, “What’s great about Goethe?” Then Amour Fou (MC-68, FC #48, NFX) leapt from a library shelf into my hand, with
writer-director Jessica Hausner looking at the life and death of Heinrich von
Kleist, from the perspective of the woman who died with him in a notorious
suicide pact. This is at the opposite
emotional pole from Mayerling, for example; portrayed with dry wit in the spare,
formal style of Eric Rohmer’s Kleist adaptation, The Marquise of O. The precision of the framing creates a cage around
the characters, who recite their lines in a stiff manner that reflects the
rectilinearity of the social milieu, and the pastness of the past. Rather than rising to surges of romantic feeling,
this film hews to historical facts, but examines them with a feminist
sociological eye for the absurd.
From that film, I was
directed by a review to Beloved Sisters
(MC-66, NFX), and found it absorbing and quite lovely. If I knew anything about Friedrich Schiller,
I might object to the liberties this film takes with his life, turning the
author’s relationship with his wife and her sister into a ménage a trois. But
in my ignorance of historical fact, I was much more taken with how
writer-director Domink Graf went to school on Truffaut, repeatedly echoing two
of my favorite films, Jules
et Jim and Two English Girls. Whatever
the fabrications of the story, a slice of German literary life between 1788 and
1805 is rendered with impressive authenticity at nearly epic length. And the sisters themselves – oh my! Played by Hannah Herzsprung and Henriette
Confurius, they command our attention with their blue eyes and emotional
intensity. (I’d say remember the names
of these actresses, but that is hard to do; think of heart-leaping beauty and
the wisdom of Confucius.) Goethe (and
Weimar Classicism) figures only on the fringes of this romance, appearing from
behind or in long shot, as if he were Mohammed and no image allowed. The previews on the DVD , however, led me to the next film.
For the German title, apparently
untranslatable – Goethe! (beware of film titles with exclamation points!) – American
distributors clearly chose Young Goethe in Love (2011,
MC-55, NFX ) to call up memories of Shakespeare in Love, for costumed hijinks with a literary veneer. Lots of lusty embraces out in nature,
galloping horses, bouts of drink and drugs, and of course the bonnie lass who
inspired The Sorrows of
Young Werther, which made Goethe a
continental celebrity at the age of 25.
Actually I found Miriam Stein quite piquant as Lotte Buff, but the actor
playing Goethe was too puppy-ish to represent the universal Germanic genius,
even as a stripling. That said, I rather
enjoyed this film for its evocation of Germany
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