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Twin Sisters

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Trying to catch up on some of the significant international cinema of the last few years, I stumbled across the Dutch epic "Twin Sisters." Based on an enormously popular bestseller, this is a much honored film that represented the Netherlands at the 2004 Academy Awards. While set largely during World War II, and having much to say about the subject, this is first and foremost a study of sisterly love and commitment. For even though the characters are separated through the bulk of the picture, the loss and the bond that these sisters have infuse every scene and every decision that they make.

The film starts with a brilliant setup. When two young girls are left orphans in Germany, they are wanted by two different sets of in-laws. The German in-laws are a poor farming family who need free labor, while the rich in-laws live in the Netherlands and want to bring the girls up properly. A concession is made that pleases neither, but eliminates further debate. Lotte, who has consumption, is given away to the Dutch family who can try to cure her and Anna, the healthy one, is kept on the German farm. It is that random--the course of your whole existence decided in a split second. It's an interesting and thought-provoking topic.

Lotte is cured and leads a life of privilege. Playing the piano, luxuriating on yachts, and finding romance and engagement with a family friend--you can't help but envy her lifestyle. Anna, meanwhile, is kept from school by being declared "retarded," worked, and brutalized on the farm. The two girls lose complete track of one another, their "parents" have each made independent decisions that it is best if they don't communicate. Eventually realizing they are each still alive, they reconnect--but much has changed, including the rise of Nazism. The film looks at Anna's life as a German, she is a maid and supports her country. And the film examines Lotte's life. While still a German, she sees things from the outside--and, in fact, her fiance is Jewish.

The beauty of "Twin Sisters" is that you see these girls evolve as products of their environments. Each has much to be admired, but each makes terrible mistakes. Your allegiance flip-flops back and forth as you inevitably get caught up in their stories. The cast is impeccable. Through different ages, and through a narrative flashback structure, there is a lot of story to be told here. Occasionally, I wished to be able to spend more time in a certain sequence--to really feel its import. But there is no question that the film packs an emotional wallop. I respected "Twin Sisters," it's a serious minded film for people who like adult entertainment. The ultimate moral dilemma is posed, what if things were different? What if the roles had been reversed, would the outcome have been the same? Good stuff. KGHarris, 01/07.

This 2002 Dutch film is based on a novel which sold millions of copies in The Netherlands and Germany. It was probably never released in the United States because the only reviews I found were from Europe or Australia. And all of these reviewers hated this film. That sure was a surprise because I loved it.

The story starts in the late 1920s when two 6-year old Dutch twins are separated after their parents' death and sent to live with distant relatives. Anna is sent to Germany where she is raised as a catholic, denied an education, forced to do backbreaking labor on a farm and beaten severely as a teenager when she is attracted to a young man who plans to be a Nazi. Lotte is raised in an upper middle class Dutch family and given every advantage. The two sisters are forbidden to see each other but do meet again in the late 1930s. By this time Anna is working as a maid for a wealthy German countess who is connected with the Nazi regime and Lotte is college educated and engaged to marry a Jew. Their meeting is brief though and they do not see each other again until after the war.

This is now a sad time for all of Europe. Anna's Austrian husband has been killed on the Russian front. Lotte's Jewish boyfriend has died in a concentration camp and The sisters have a terrible fight, with Lotte accusing Anna of being a Nazi and Anna fleeing in tears from her sister's home.

This is all told in flashbacks as the basic narrative is one of the two elderly women meeting at a European spa in modern times. Lotte is clearly upscale, her white hair arranged in a salon hairdo, her clothes new and fashionable. Anna looks more like a servant who has led a harsh life. She is the one who has tracked her sister down with the hope of reconciliation in their old age.

Yes, this was all melodramatic. But the acting was so good, the screenplay so intriguing and the directing so fast paced, that I was absolutely caught up in the story and couldn't take my eyes from the screen. I also felt real emotion throughout and consider this film a real discovery. So, in spite of the European critics and in spite of the fact that this film might be hard to find, I definitely recommend it.

Not too long ago I watched "Out of the Ashes," which was about a Jewish-Hungarian doctor who survived Auschwitz because she was assigned to assist Joseph Mengele in his diabolical experiments on the prisoners. Mengele devoted much of his "research" to the study of twins, with his goal being to discover how Aryan women could give birth to twins, thereby improving the master race and no doubt increasing the number of soldiers who could serve the Third Reich. "De Twilling" ("Twin Sisters") talks about Auschwitz, but never goes there, and while this film is set against World War II and the Holocaust, I would not qualify it as being about the Holocaust. However, I do find it quite ironic that this 2002 film from the Netherlands, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, tells a horror story about twins being separated not by Nazis but rather by their own family.

In 1926 a pair of orphaned twins are separated when their parents die. Young Anna (Nadja Uhl) goes to live on a poor farm in Germany. Her guardians tell everyone that Anna is mentally retarded so that she can stay home from school and do chores and be beaten by her "father" (think Cosette from "Les Miserables"). Meanwhile, little Lotte (Thekla Reuten), who suffers from tuberculosis, is raised by a wealthy Dutch family and learns to play the piano after recovering. The young girls desperately want to write to each other, but such letters are unsent or unreceived, and their only contact appears to be on a psychic level when one of them is in great pain or other emotional distress. However, as they grow older this connection fades away, although there is much more emotional pain to come.

The main narrative thread of "De Twilling" tells the story of Anna and Lotte through 1944, emphasizing the different lives they live. Anna (Sina Richardt) becomes a servant while Lotte (Julia Koopmans) enjoys her privileged life. But the most important distinction comes at the time that the two find each other once again, because Lotte is in love with David (Jeroen Spitzenberger), who is Jewish, and Anna has fallen for Martin (Roman Knizka), who ends up in the S.S. You should be able to see in general terms where this one is going, because as we follow their story in the past we also see old Lotte (Ellen Vogel) and old Anna (Gudrun Okras) in the present, as old women, and clearly Anna does not want to have anything to do with Lotte. Something horrible must have happened to make one twin, who was so desperate to find her long list twin, to turn her back on her sister when they were finally together.

"De Twilling" is directed by Ben Sombogaart ("Mijn vader woont in Rio," "Het Zakmes"), with a script by Marieke van der Pol adapted by Tessa de Loo's best-selling novel. The result is somewhat melodramatic and the film requires the empathy generated by the first section, when the twin sisters are still young and their plight is so heartbreaking, to sustain it through the grim joke that Fate plays on them during the war. Some viewers will find it to be too manipulative, and the ending will either be seen as redemptive or simply the pulling out the final cliché in the deck. World War II is kept in the background, details coming in newspapers or letters, rather than marching troops or exploding shells, which simply underscores that what matters is how Fate has put the sisters on opposite sides. This matters because clearly Fate is the culprit here and if it had been Lotte who had TB instead of Anna we have to believe the results would have been the same, which for this film would be the biggest horror of them all.

DE TWEELING (TWIN SISTERS), based on the highly successful novel by Tessa de Loo and adapted brilliantly for the screen by Marieke van der Pol, is assuredly one of the most touching films to date about the strength of family bonds decimated by the horrors of WW II. Director Ben Sombogaart follows Dutch writer de Loo's lead in making this story about the differing fates of twin girls separated at the death of their parents more of a parallel tale than capitalizing on the grim reality of Hitler's influence. The result is a cinematically magnificent, gently hued verismo style of film that succeeds even more in its impact than if it were constantly doused in the dark side of its subject.

Germany 1920. Lotte Bamberg (played by three actresses though a long life - child Julia Koopmans, young woman Thekla Reuten and aged woman Ellen Vogel) and Anna Bamberg (child Sina Richardt, young woman Nadja Uhl and aged woman Gudrun Okras) are inseparable twins at age six, living life to its fullest until suddenly both parents are gone and they are split up: the consumptive Lotte goes to live with her upper class Dutch aunt in Holland and the healthy Anna remains in Germany with her poor uncle on a pig farm. Lotte lives a life of privilege, recovers form tuberculosis, studies German at University and sings Schumann ('Frauen Lieben und Leben' appropriately!) accompanied by her soon to be husband David (Jeroen Spitzenberger) who happens to be Jewish. As the war threatens Hitler's invasion on Holland, David is sent to Auschwitz and brokenhearted Lotte marries David's kind brother and has a child. Meanwhile Anna leads an abused life on the poor and filthy farm, is beaten by her heinous uncle when she begins dating a young handsome Austrian Martin (Roman Knizka) and runs away to work as a maid. Martin believes in Socialism and joins Hitler's army, and is killed.

Throughout the years of separation each twin writes to the other but their guardians for varying reasons never mail the letters. Anna finally finds Lotte and they have a brief time together in Lotte's elegant surroundings. But when Anna observes German dinner guests berating Jews she flees. The two sisters find it difficult to separate the losses of their husbands: Lotte blames Anna's siding with the Nazis as a cause of David's death. Anna defends Martin's role as one of idealism that had nothing to do with the genocide of the Jews. They part, seemingly to never meet again. But as old women bedraggled Anna seeks out the elegant Lotte and the two come to understand their opposite opinions of what the war did to destroy their happiness.

The entire cast is so fine that it is difficult to single any one actor out for distinction: this is truly ensemble acting. Never pushing the story to the edge of saccharine or excess of war violence, director Sombogaart keeps his focus on the dialogue between the sisters central, embroidered with the opposing dichotomies of class and political commitment visceral but understated. The cinematography of Piotr Kukla and the radiant musical score by Fons Merkies are astonishingly effective. This is one of the powerful movies about the Holocaust from an entirely different stance - one that grabs you by the heart and holds on for the 135 minutes of the film...and beyond. In Dutch, German and English with subtitles. Very Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, September 05

This is a beautiful film. Its original title is De Tweeling (The Twins). It traces the contrasting lives of a pair of twin sisters, inseparable when young but forcibly parted at the age of six after the death of their parents. Beginning in 1920s Germany, the orphan girls are taken by distant relatives to live very different lives, one as a poor illiterate farmgirl in rural Germany and the other as a cultured Dutch girl in neighbouring Holland. Prevented by their foster families from communicating with each other, they only meet again in their twenties just before the outbreak of the Second World War. By then Lotte, the twin in Holland has entered University and become engaged to a Jewish man while Anna the sister left behind has become a housemaid and fallen for a Nazi Officer. While both sisters lose their men in the course of the war, Lotte ends up blaming her sister for the death of her fiance who is deported by the Nazis to Buchenwald. There follows decades of enmity with Lotte unable to forgive and Anna at a loss as to how to reconcile with her embittered sister. Told in flashbacks through the eyes of the elderly twins, it is by turns glowingly beautiful, poignant and heart rending. Its core lies towards the end where the two old women reassess their lives and Anna concludes, "we are the product of our circumstance. Put in the same situation, you would have done the same." And as she also says, "I did not love an SS Officer, I loved Martin."

The sisters' plight is in a way a metaphor for the relationship between the Dutch and German peoples. In the film's latter half, with the allied liberation of the Netherlands, Lotte's Dutch family hoist the Dutch tricolor and the ancient strains of the Wilhelmus (Dutch National Anthem) sound in the background. The irony is that in the first stanza of the Wilhelmus, are the lines, "ben ik, van Duitsen bloed, den vaderland getrouwe, blijf ik tot in den dood." (Of German blood am I, Loyal to the fatherland until the day I die). And here we are reminded that these are two peoples, born of the same stock, who through the vagaries of circumstance wind up on opposite sides as bitter enemies. The sisters' story is as much a personal story as a story of their respective homelands.

Three sets of actors play the twins at the three stages of their lives. They all do a wonderful job in a film that is compulsive viewing, moving and believable. This film won a host of awards in the Netherlands and Germany. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2003 but lost out to Canada's The Barbarian Invasions.

Unfortunately Buena Vista/Miramax has issued the truncated American version which was cut by some 17mins. Amazon's website is wrong in stating the runtime as 135mins. That is the length of the uncut movie. The DVD itself is shortened to 118mins. It is a totally barebones DVD. Not even the theatrical trailer is included. However, the picture has been beautifully transferred in its original 1.85:1 widescreen (enhanced for widescreen TV). We are given the original Dutch/German soundtrack in Dolby 5.1 Surround. It comes with optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. However this Miramax release is not recommendable. The version to get is the Region 2 Dutch edition on the RCV label. The Dutch edition contains the uncut film with optional English and Dutch subtitles. It also comes with Deleted Scenes, Behind the Scenes footage, a Making Of documentary as well as the theatrical trailer. However your DVD player must be able to play back Region 2 discs and your system must have native PAL capability. (Dutch video is in PAL format, not the standard American NTSC). The Dutch version is available from Amazon but under its original title, "De Tweeling", not "Twin Sisters".

Wow, there are some poorly written reviews here. This is a beautiful film, lovely and tender and careful and sensitive. And worthy of more than a lengthy plot synopsis. That plot, hacked to bits by others here, does not need repeating. But the themes, barely touched, are timeless. And wonderfully presented. While a "Holocaust" film, it is not a grim parade of stacked corpses or incinerators. It is a film of gradual opening, as new things become clear, and people realize that their environments and their choices have led them to places they'd rather not be. And it again reminds us just how potent true evil is when it faces those who do not believe in its existence, who ignore and excuse and explain and justify.

What complicity does one have when evil is done in one's name without one's full knowledge? And when do we forgive those who have hurt us? Hard questions indeed. This film's answer is that love transcends complicity. Love says "I accept you, no matter what you've done. Come home." How beautiful. And how freeing.

So many delightful details, carefully and wondrously presented, make this a film that is both sad and yet joyous. The three pair of actresses are uniformly wonderful. The look is a treasure, as we move between comfort and filth. Life has been frightfully hard for many in the 20th Century, and yet those people, residents of cities that ceased to exist, or sole survivors of extended families that were exterminated, or scarred veterans who witnessed the horrors of battle, came back, cleaned up, rebuilt, and started over. When we see the contents of Ann's life in that little suitcase, consisting of fewer clothes than we have in a load of laundry, a single photo, some letters and a mother's handkerchief, our hearts are torn by how much this poor woman has lost. And yet she persevered, though rejected, scorned, and abused. Our world that knows nothing of patience, endurance, or resilience, calls that bravery, but Anna would never have so described herself. She just went on, as she had to. How beautiful. And when she finally gets the acceptance -- not forgiveness, for she has done nothing wrong -- she seeks, we triumph with her. How can people carry grudges to their grave? What do they get but an ego salved at the expense of so much else? We all fail. We all fall. We need an extended hand, and when it comes, oh, how soothing it is.

There is something sick about being drawn to Holocaust set films, this genre of human suffering. No people eating plants or monsters. No buckets of blood and gauged out eyes and mangled bodies that do great advertising for things like chainsaws. Just looking in the face of human evil in its worst intellectual form knowing this is all real.

I loved the scenery. The middle class dutch home with its lovely white tile kitchen. The Bavarian farm nice and scenic. The street scenes give the viewer a feel for the time. The crouded train station with all the soldiers preparing to go off to war. The Countess's mansion quite authentic. Indeed one can readily close one's eyes and feel as if one is actually there. The women properly dressed unlike most women today. So lovely.

The story itself is quite sad. Neither girl is Jewish, they're twins broken up but their lives are ripped apart in consequence to Hitler's actions with tragic results.

After their father dies, sickly Lotte is taken by Dutch relatives and taken into their family to be nursed back to health to grow up into a spoiled trousered little middle class princess (and like women like that of the time, she probably smokes). A telling scene of her character is as Germany invades Holland, she insists this should not get in the way of her going out sailing. Anna on the other hand gets it bad. Taken by her German relatives to live with them on their farm, she is not taken into their family. She is treated just as labor. They report her as sickly and retarded to collect social payments and so they don't have to send her to school and pay for supplies and things like that for her education. Her uncle is an ardent anti-nazi who beats her while his wife mistreats her. When she falls in love with an idealistic young blacksmith drawn to the nazis he almost kills her. The parish priest removes her from the premesis and takes her to a shelter. Later the nazis decide to sterilize her based on the filings of her uncle claiming she is retarded.

Eventually the two sisters briefly reunite. Anna goes to work as a maid for a nazi sympathizer. Lotte visits and becomes appalled at her sister. When she returns to Holland she decides she doesn't want to have 'anything to do with that German thing'. Perhaps as much for what she has become in mind as well as her social status as a maid, someone beneath Lotte's social station.

Anna can not understand why her own sister, her only flesh and blood could turn on her.

Both fall in love. Lotte falls for a Jew. Anna falls for a kind Austrian conscript who eventually becomes an SS officer. And both lose their loves to the war. Lotte's love dies in Auschwitz. Anna's on the Russian front. After the war, Anna tries to reconcile with her sister. Lotte drives her out.

As old women they meet in a health spa. Anna, naive and forgiving, tries desperatly to reconcile with her sister.

Eventually, while lost in a woods, Lotte realizes that had circumstances been different she would have been in her sister's place. By which time Anna dies from her ill health.

Two German sisters, twins, were orphaned before they were ten years old. One of them, Anna, was taken by an insistent relative, a poor German farmer, who wanted to declare her mentally incompetent and thereby receive a government stipend. An affluent Dutch relative took the other twin, Lotte, a sickly girl. They did not want to separate the twins, but they recognized that this girl needed the care that would not be forthcoming from the German family, and were hopeful that they could maintain or restore her to good health.

The Germans treated Anna as a servant (perhaps more like a slave), and she eventually ran away from them. This Dutch family was cruel to Lotte in their own way although they provided her with en education and encouraged her in the arts, singing and playing the piano.

The two girls had no communication with each other and it was 15 years since the were parted until they saw each other again.

It was clear that the experiences of these lost years were just too much of a gap to overcome. The girls had grown to womanhood and while they had memories to share, that was just not enough to span the gulf between them in their manner of life, in their prejudices, in their entire outlook on life. The second world war made the possibility of a reconciliation between this German and this Dutch sister even more difficult, if not impossible.

Anna had the harder physical life, working as a servant, having had a history of beatings, and she only came into her own happiness when she found a man, but that ended tragically. And her love for her sister was, as far as she was concerned, inexplicably one-sided.

Lotte found her true love also, but in the tumult of the war he was taken from her. She blamed herself for the tragedy of his life, and this feeling of guilt hardened her, particularly where her sister was concerned. She blamed her sister for her lover's fate, in trying to hide her own guilt.

The two sisters meet as old women, at a health spa in Holland. The movie is a series of flashbacks for each of them, as Anna tries to get through to Lotte. There finally is a reconciliation of sorts, but it is too late.

If estrangement can occur between twins, such estrangement can develop between any siblings. But perhaps a talking out may have helped. That is the core of the movie. Can the bonds of sisterhood overcome even the most profound of differences. This is its universality. The movie is painful to watch at times, but shows the times and the attitudes of the principles clearly and logically, and carries the viewer along with feelings of sympathy, empathy, and expectation.

A very sad, but very telling tale.

As a native of Netherlands, my husband was enthralled by the perspective and the lives of the twins. He gained new understanding of life in western Europe during WWII. This film showed a part of the war rarely seen. I have since loaned the DVD to friends; everyone has voiced their appreciation of the film. BUY IT, WATCH IT, LEARN...

This is an excellent film set in the 1940s about twin sisters who are separated when they are young, one is adopted by a wealthy family in Holland, the other by a poor Catholic farmer in Germany. The film shows the different trajectories the girls' lives take based on their upbringing. The women meet up as adults and discover why they have not spoken in years. Overall it's an excellent film about WWII which examines the personal impact of the war.