From Germany, a Literary Giant’s Ménage à Trois

As in years past, this year’s field for the Oscar for best foreign-language film includes a goodly number of biopics, among them Mexico’s “Cantinflas,” France’s “Saint Laurent” and Indonesia’s “Sukarno.” Then there is Germany’s surprisingly audacious entry, Dominik Graf’s “Beloved Sisters,” about the 18th-century poet, playwright and philosopher Friedrich Schiller and his erotically and intellectually charged relationship with the sisters Caroline and Charlotte von Lengefeld.

Schiller, born in 1759, eventually married Charlotte, but “Beloved Sisters” argues that he was the focal point of a ménage à trois that included Caroline. The film is set against the backdrop of the French Revolution and the Golden Age of Weimar culture, embodied by Schiller’s rival and friend Goethe. The poet and the sisters struggle in the film, with moments of success and failure, to make their unorthodox relationship work.

“Beloved Sisters” is Mr. Graf’s first feature since “The Red Cockatoo” (2006), another film about a love triangle, but set in the 1960s. In recent years he has preferred to work in television, which he praises for allowing him to operate like a “smuggler,” quick and lean and independent, without cadres of producers looking over his shoulder.

“This situation with Schiller happened a bit like a wonder,” Mr. Graf, 62, said when asked about his return to the big screen. “I did not have to make one compromise. With all the other features I’ve made, I could put a finger on somebody who talked too much into the script or didn’t give us the money we needed. So I can’t blame anyone else if this is not a good film.”

Speaking by phone from Munich, his base, Mr. Graf talked about the image of Schiller, a cultural hero in Germany, he acquired as a child and how it changed as a result of making “Beloved Sisters.” Here are excerpts from that conversation:

Why Schiller?

Schiller is always there. He is a poet you get to know really well in Germany in school, in the first class where you learn poems by heart. But it wasn’t the man Schiller who really interested me, it was the story of the three people together in this triangle, having a sort of utopian idea and dream of how love in a threesome combination could be.

So this is a new take on Schiller?

For sure. All the Schiller specialists, and we have some really good ones here, they knew about it, but I think that normal people didn’t really. Schiller was supposed to be a workaholic, a man of strong speech, but not a person of very sensitive eroticism and love. I think at that time, in the 18th century, people didn’t fall in love with their bodies. I think their minds fell in love.

Are you saying that this definitely happened or merely that it could have happened?

It’s a bit difficult to say, because as you learn in the end, there are some letters burned. But everyone was silent about this thing when it happened. The whole of Weimar and Berlin high society and intellectual circles, they didn’t talk about it. It was really well-known and also well-hidden. But I don’t think I invented much really, just a few details.

Did you view the biopic format as something to be followed, or to be played with or overcome? What are your feelings about the genre?

Biopic as a genre is usually just drama, isn’t it? If biopics are a genre, then it is something that at first sight is pretty boring for me. Because following a biography through the years of getting famous, then getting more famous, then getting forgotten or whatever, that is not something I would be interested to tell. I think it was the abstract idea behind it, having to show what happens to that utopian love through the 14 or 15 years that the story spans.

In your director’s statement you say “what attracted me initially was making a movie about words.” But film is such a visual medium that making a film about words becomes a technical challenge, no?

[Laughs] Yes, I know the visual thing has become extremely important in the last 20 years, with all the technical developments. But when I learned to love cinema, it was also very much an art of good dialogue, an art of words. The French did it, Eric Rohmer and Jean Eustache, they had good dialogue films of four hours, and to me they were challenging and great. Also, I always loved the sophisticated American comedies of the ’30s and ’40s, Lubitsch and Cukor and Hawks, which is also all words. I never saw it as an antithesis, visual and words. They belong together.

Let’s talk about some of the themes and ideas of the film. We tend to think that people behave these days in ways they didn’t before. But you seem to be drawing parallels with the past and saying, no, we’re not as different as we think.

Yes, the first parallel, I think, is the way they go with their emotions, with the revolutionary feeling of changing everything, changing society, that their love is something new. But these dreams and revolutionary ideas somehow become colder and more tired, and that reminds me of the German ’60s and ’70s, when everybody thought we would invent a new world, not only from the outside, but also in the way we behave, get on with each other, make love. That ended not in a blood orgy like the French Revolution, but in a terrible rage that really shook the country. These situations are 200 years apart, but similar. It’s not costume drama at that moment, it’s completely vivid again.

You also seem to be saying something about celebrity culture. Schiller and Goethe have these elevated intellectual exchanges that draw huge crowds, like they are rock stars. But they are celebrities because of their ideas, unlike, say, the Kardashians.

Right, and I still had that when I was in university, where we had professors who drew thousands of students because they were high-powered intellectuals with very interesting ideas. But that part seems gone at the moment, and maybe that is also something that I wanted to show.

Speaking of celebrity culture, I want to ask you about the Oscars. This is the first time you are competing?

Yes, but I live with a director [who made two films nominated for Oscars], Caroline Link. She didn’t win the first time, for “Beyond Silence,” but then she won it with “Nowhere in Africa.” So indirectly I have had contact with the Oscars already.

And has she given you advice?

Oh yes, and also from watching her go on this dance floor already two times, I have made a few decisions. I didn’t feel it was the right place for me, going there to Hollywood. As a German, it’s a bit like the World Cup, and as the one carrying the German flag, that’s not really me.

But now you are stuck with that role.

I am very curious what will happen. I don’t expect anything, and I won’t be disappointed if nothing happens. But I am glad it is this way now. I have to see this at least once.