A complex film with good performances all round, but Karoline Herfurth as Lilli (a young dance student) is quite outstanding, expressive in face and physical movements. My only criticism is her terrible diction. My German is good, but without the English subtitles I would have understood very little of what she said. The suicide of her brother left her with very mixed emotions: she loved him but at the same time was jealous of him because he was their parents' favourite. The parents, whose relationship with each other is also fraught, never ask her anything about how she feels. An elderly painter who has been asked to paint a double portrait of the siblings (her from life, him from photographs) is the only person who is interested in finding out what she felt about her brother - and that is initially only so that he can get some idea of how to portray them. She is rebellious, vulnerable, and looking for love (in the wrong quarters). The film is very long, (two and a quarter hours?), partly because there are a couple of sub-plots which might perhaps have been cut, and the ending is also rather drawn-out, with one mawkish false note (in my view) right at the end.
Review of A Year Ago in Winter
