After the death of her mother in 1926, six-year-old twins born in Germany, Lotte and Anna separated. They belonged to further relatives, and fate played out so that the sickly, tuberculous Lotte ended up with a middle-class family in the Netherlands, and Anna with a farmer in Germany. And while the people with whom Lotte ended up are well-to-do intellectuals, secular Protestants, the family with which Anna ended up are primitive, backward German Catholics who raised the girl to be a maid. And we will follow this in this Dutch film that reached the Oscar nomination in a period of some seventy years, all practically to the present when both old women are when they meet after more than half a century without contact.
Ben Sombogaart made the film “De Tweeling” based on the novel and bestseller of the same name by Tesse De Loo, and the different places where they grew up, different ingrained worldviews and especially World War II, will make the sisters lose touch. And it was “Twin Sisters” a classic melodrama, one of those lavishly produced and obviously expensive films that try to play on the emotions of the viewer, whose plot stretches over a really long period of time. Although just before the start of the war, the lost sisters will be able to find and meet briefly and, of course, promise each other that they will see each other again soon, life will unfold so that the meeting will not come so quickly.
While Lotta’s fiancé, a young Dutch Jew, will end up in a Nazi concentration camp when the war begins, Anna will marry a young Viennese who joined the Waffen SS. The “Twin Sisters” was in fact a profound tragedy about human destinies destroyed by World War II and Nazism, and this film provoked considerable controversy because in addition to the victims of the people of occupied Europe, personal tragedies of ordinary Germans who were not for war, but they did nothing, and probably could not, to avoid that horror. Rating 7.5 / 10.
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