"Schwestern oder Die Balance des Glücks", also known as "Sisters, or The Balance of Happiness", is a West German film from 1979, so a few more years and this one will have its 40th anniversary. The director and one of the writers was Margarethe von Trotta, who was still married to Volker Schlöndorff around that time. The film runs for slightly over 90 minutes and won lead actress Jutta Lampe a German Film Award. Around that time, von Trotta made several films that focused on the topic of feminism and mostly female protagonists. This one here is the story of Maria, but also of a few more (female) characters, that play a major role in Maria's life, such as her sister. The latter is played by Gudrun Gabriel and I must say she looked pretty stunning. But back to the story. We get to witness Maria's struggles in terms of personal and professional life and we find out who her real friends are (no) and what she is a really like. Is she a likable character or an antagonist in her own films. There is no one definite answer to that question I guess. von Trotta did a good job with giving her characters shades and keep them from being all good or all bad which was a frequent problem in (German) film around that time. Nonetheless, I must say that I was not really that impressed by the story overall and I cared little about the characters and what happened to them. Maybe the reason was that it was a fairly bleak and slow film just like most of von Trotta's work. The acting is fairly decent though and luckily she did not collaborate with the extremely overrated Sukowa here yet. Still, all in all, it was never an investing film for me whatsoever, which is why I give it a thumbs-down. Not recommended.
