OVP: Twin Sisters (2002)

Film: Twin Sisters (2003)

Stars: Ellen Vogel, Gudrun Okras, Thekla Reuten, Nadja Uhl, Julia Koopmans, Sina Richardt

Director: Ben Sombogaart

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-The Netherlands)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

It's always exciting when we finish up a year for the Oscar Viewing Project, both in terms of write-ups or in terms of actual viewings.  While we'll be hitting the former next week (at our two-a-week pace, we'll be cranking through ceremonies every ten weeks now), we are actually hitting a final viewing today for the latter.  Though we've got now three years before it in the process (I go chronologically from when I finish the last picture for each year), and therefore it'll be toward the back-half of the year before we finally get into the 2003 Official Ballots on the blog, I am done with my screenings from the year with Twin Sisters, a Dutch film that I knew virtually nothing about (I barely remember this even being a nominee), and after watching it, while I'm not sure about it being a nominee, it's a more jarring movie than expected.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on two sisters, Lotte (Vogel, Reuten, & Koopmans at various ages) and Anna (Okras, Uhl, & Richardt at the same ages), twin sisters who are separated by relatives after their parents die.  Lotte ends up living in an affluent, loving home in the Netherlands, while Anna is with the poorer relations in Germany, basically put into servitude & beaten for her troubles.  When World War II breaks out, the sisters are put on different sides, with Lotte in love with a Jewish man who is killed in a concentration camp while Anna marries an SS Officer who dies in battle.  When Lotte discovers her sister was married to a Nazi, she stops speaking to her for decades, and only at the end of their life do the sisters reconcile shortly before Anna dies in Lotte's arms, the two once again sisters.

The movie is quite dark if you don't know what you're getting into.  Anna doesn't have the traditional redemption that you expect from such a picture, where she joins the resistance or her bigotry is portrayed as something she quickly recants...her casual antisemitism is shocking, and perhaps the film's most fascinating aspect.  After all, these are twin sisters...how much of our prejudice & our politics is driven by the way we are brought up, rather than embracing an expansive worldview.  

This is a question worth asking, but Twin Sisters doesn't seem interested in answering it.  The movie has some fine acting (particularly Richardt), but it is too sporadic, trying to shove every wartime cliche you can think of into one movie, and doesn't spend enough time with the women when they are adults to justify the decades-long rift between the two.  Particularly how Lotte seemed to fall for a man she didn't love as much as her dead fiancé (again, an idea that would have been fascinating within a better movie), but it feels too rushed, and too filled with familiar beats, to be intriguing.