Cinema Tuesdays Review

Lord, Help the Mister…
By Nathan Cone

Nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2003, "Twin Sisters" is the Inspired By True Events story of twins whose close relationship is shattered by love and war. It is a well-acted feature, but the movie also shows a few signs of what appears to be its modest budget, and it contains a few overly familiar dramatic elements.

In pre-war Germany, the sudden loss of their parents leads young twins Lotte and Anna to be split up. Lotte, the sickly one, is shuttled off to the Netherlands to live with relatives of privilege, while Anna stays in Germany to work on a farm with her abusive uncle and aunt. Both foster parents keep the girls from communicating with one another for reasons that are not quite clear or even rational, and so each grows up to be a very different person. Lotte, cultured and polished, becomes engaged to a Jewish man, while Anna flees the farm to work in the city as a maid, and despite her first-hand experience of the German state attempting to do away with her for supposedly being retarded, nevertheless falls for a Nazi soldier and marries him.

The girls eventually do find one another and meet, but a chance remark by Anna raises doubts in Lotte's mind about her sister's true feelings for her, and the twins' relationship is never the same again.

The film is told in extended flashbacks, as we learn early on through more contemporary footage that Lotte and Anna do reunite yet again as elderly women at a spa, where they don't exactly forgive one another, but do come to an understanding about the way the war affected their relationship. But it's unclear whether this is a chance meeting or not. And SPOILER ALERT: the elderly Anna's constant wheezing and huffing means only one thing -- she will be gone by the time the credits roll. END SPOILER.

Thekla Reuten and Nadja Uhl are very good at playing their roles as the young Lotte and Anna. Uhl is especially convincing as she deals with Anna's conflicting emotions. The film is effectively shot to have a slightly washed-out look to it, like a fading photograph. At times, the seams of the film appear to show themselves when a crowded train station scene is shot almost entirely in close-ups and medium shots, diluting the chaos of the locale, and wardrobe seems a little too contemporary in a few scenes, though perhaps I'm just not well-versed in the European fashions of the 1940s.

The DVD of "Twin Sisters" is remarkable in that it includes no special features whatsoever. Not even a trailer. For that reason, it is hard to recommend a purchase of the film, but if your interest is piqued, a rental might be in order. In Dutch and German, "Twin Sisters" may suffer a bit from what seems like the compression of certain events to fit into the confines of a feature film. That can lead to the kind of snap actions by characters that seem incomprehensible to the viewer at home. But the movie does prove that there are still many more incredible but true stories to be told about World War II and its effect on people caught in the crossfire.

11/5/05

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