Imagination, encapsulated by a spooky fairy tale about two sisters depending on one another in a dark forest, joined sisters Maria and Anna Sündermann in childhood. Now, adults, they live together. Maria (Jutta Lampe, excellent) is a supremely competent, efficient executive secretary in a high-powered business firm; Anna, who is younger, is pursuing a science degree. Her sister, who forsook higher education for a trade school following their father’s death, is footing the bill. Indeed, she is directing Anna towards work as unimaginative as her own. Despondent, one night, while Maria is out on a date, listening to “Dido’s Lament” from Purcell’s opera Dido and Æneas, Anna sits at her desk, slashes her wrists and watches her life slowly flow out of her. She leaves behind a diary, including a curse against Maria, who replaces Anna with a typist at work, Miriam, whom she moves into her apartment and over whom she tries exerting more dictatorial control. At the last, alone, Maria says aloud something about being both Maria and Anna in order to strike a balance in life. But has Maria arrived at this conclusion or is she quoting an entry from the deceased’s diary?
Writer-director Margarethe von Trotta’s Schwestern oder Die Balance des Glücks opens with a subjective camera penetrating the childhood forest of imagination. After Anna’s death, Maria is haunted to the point of terror at the prospect of falling asleep and having bad dreams. Peers of von Trotta had lamented the surfeit of imagination that generated political and geopolitical horrors; von Trotta’s film balances that concern by reminding us of the cost of too little imagination. Without this essential element, the intimacy of sisterhood, such as von Trotta shows, degenerates into conflict and needless suffering.
Interesting.
Dennis Grunes 