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WITH YOU IN POETRY
YOUNG GOETHE IN LOVE (NR) For anyone
who loved Shakespeare in Love and who has
been awaiting eagerly a movie as charm
ing, romantic and energetic, director Philipp
Stolzl's lavish period-piece Young Goethe in
Love should do the trick. Loosely based on
the life of poet, writer and dramatist Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, the movie focuses on
Goethe's (Alexander Fehling) early years, when
he's forced to take a job at a Wetzlar court
after his aspiring literary career fizzles. At the
court, Goethe befriends
a fellow clerk, Wilhem
Jerusalem (Volker Bruch),
and falls in love with
the radiant Lotte Buff
(Miriam Stein) who lives
with her family outside
of the city. Lotte falls
for the failed poet, too,
but their burgeoning
romance is sideswiped
when Lotte's father, Vater
Buff (Burghart Klauftner),
agrees to have his daugh
ter marry the ambitious court counselor Albert
Kestner (Moritz Bleibtreu), Goethe's mentor.
Young Goethe in Love play* fast and furious
with the facts of Goethe's life, but no mat
ter. This is frothy entertainment crafted with
verve and affection toward its characters.
Even Bleibtreu's bumbling suitor Kestner is
imbued with complexity and a modicum of
sympathy, although he is ostensibly the "bad
guy" of the picture. It's hard to go wrong
when your leads are so engaging and warm
as they are here. Fehling strikes just the right
mixture of wiliness, naivete and youthful
robustness, but he's also able to convey the
torment inside him convincingly. This is, of
course, the man who would go on to produce
the Liber-Romantic breakthrough The Sorrows
of Young Werther (chronicled in the movie)
and later Faust; so any failure on Fehling's
part to portray the darkness within would be
ruinous. Relative-newcomer Stein is likewise a
revelation: entrancing in
her subtle, earthy manner,
yet generating enough
erotic sparks for us to see
how she could influence
Goethe's first great liter
ary work.
Romantic, light enter
tainment routinely gets
a bad rap. There's a lot
of rom-com dross out
there, which makes it
increasingly difficult to
mount an argument in its
favor when something good does come along.
This is not a perfect movie by any means—
it weirdly lacks wit, and the whole thing is
aggressively by-the-numbers. But there's gen
uine, fleet-footed charm here. Young Goethe in
Love may be the perfect cinematic alternative
to some of the bleak and weighty end-of-the-
year releases out now.
Derek Hill
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