Die Zwillinge

When their parents die, both twin sisters Lotte and Anna are seperated by their family. One of them is raised by a wealthy Dutch family and the other one by a German farmer family. They are not allowed to see or even write each other. Because they live in two different worlds they become two different women. The dutch girl is going to marry a Jew, while the German one falls in love with a SS-soldier. When they finally contact each other it turns out that they have grown apart too far, and a definite break seems inevitable. Will it ever be possible to become reconciled with each other?

Twin sisters is a beautiful movie that fully deservs the oscar nomination. It's not really another WWII movie as much people think, but more a touching story behind the actual events of the war.

I read the book, De Tweeling by Tessa de Loo, and I must say that the movie most certainly lived up to the high quality of the book, in some ways even surpassed it.

The movie is about two little girls, obviously twins, who tragically get separated. One to work on a farm, the other to live with rich relatives in The Netherlands to recover from her tbc. The movie then jumps to present where to two elderly sisters meet again in a spa. However, their meeting is far from loving and it becomes clear that some scar from the past obstructs the reunion of these two sisters.

The movie then brilliantly uses flashbacks to reveal the scar that has separated the two for life, and it mostly comes down to the second world war, both living and experiences it in a different way and place.

I read the book to this film about 6 years ago, back when I was in high school and was so impressed by it that I bought the book for my bookcase three years ago or something. I haven't read the book since and I'm not some kind of purist, heck I don't even remember the specifics of the book. At best that makes me as biased as someone who didn't read the book at all...or at worst it means that I'm not a 'purist'.

Translating a book into film, the visible medium, there are so many stages at which it can go wrong. Luckily it didn't with this one. The casting is perfect. I especially liked how Lotte and Anna spoke believably broken German and Dutch. Not as it sometimes happens in American productions, when they for instance speak Dutch and say it is German. This was very well done indeed and added to the films worth. What touches me most about De Tweeling though is the fact at heart, that you get shaped partly by your environment. It is worked out very well in this film and my favorite part is that the film distances itself (as does the book) from pointing out one of the two sisters as 'the bad guy'. The film just shows the horror, the desperation and the pain on the common man from both sides; the aggressor and the wrongfully invaded. It is a truly great theme and it is one of the few films I guess in which you actually get to feel sympathy for the Germans (or at least some of them). Maybe that is understandable. Maybe it is logic that most films portray the Germans as gruesome and despicable as quite a lot of them maybe were. But every once in a while a film comes along that shows us that they are human too, that they suffered losses; that German lives lost shatter German families as they shatter American, Dutch, Polish, Jewish, English and so on. This is one of those films. It strays from the cliché, which is what I liked about it as I did like Stalingrad (1993) and Die Brücke (1959).

8 out of 10

De tweeling is the best dutch film up until this point. It was surprisingly well made for a dutch production. With more votes it would become a top 250 movie and I think it deserves to be. A few years ago I almost cried because of the Green Mile. This movie almost brought to tears too. It takes very much for my cold hart to be touched. Not only was I touched by the story but also the quality of this production.

Unfortunately the government wants to stop funding the dutch movieindustry. That'll be the end great dutch movies like de tweeling.

Normally I don't see movies as good as this one. I happened across this film one night when I had nothing to do. I saw the title and thought it would be a mushy story about twin sisters...all rainbows and glitter. I was pleasantly surprised and thought the whole concept behind the story was genius. Not only is the story wonderful the movie quality is wonderful. It is now ranked among my favorite films. This movie truly embraces what it was like to be on both sides of the war. I found myself sympathizing with Anna even though I feel as negatively as I do about Hitler and Nazi Germany. I also deeply sympathized with Lotte and the suffering she and her fiancé went threw. In the end I wanted them to put it all behind them and embrace each other again.