Oscar-winning actor Maximilian Schell is also a director, and he has made two documentaries capturing his fascination with great blond actresses.
The 1984 film “Marlene” was a highly eccentric, and sometimes maddening, portrait of Marlene Dietrich, a true cinematic goddess. Dietrich complicated the process by refusing to be photographed, although that was not the only odd thing about the movie.
Schell’s latest project is much closer to him, but just as eccentric. “My Sister Maria” looks at his older sister, the celebrated Maria Schell, whose stardom in postwar German movies presented an important heroine for a country piecing itself back together after its monstrous preceding years.
This sounds like a worthy subject, but Maximilian Schell’s approach deliberately blurs the definition of documentary. He clearly re-stages moments from Maria’s later years, including scenes of himself talking with her doctor, who describes a brain disorder in Maria that sounds like senility or an early stage of Alzheimer’s.
If that is true, then how lucid is the Maria we see in the film, and to what extent is she willingly participating in it? The woman we see has withdrawn from the world, into a Swiss cabin she fills with television sets (so she can watch her old movies). Still, she appears to have her faculties, in conversations with her brother.
The movie describes her inability to deal with real-life issues such as money, or her lack of it. We see the dramatization of an incident in which her debts were paid off by Maximilian so that she wouldn’t lose her home (he had to sell off paintings from his art collection, an episode he presents in a way that comes across as rather immodest on his part).
Along with these sections, there are clips from her past career. The excerpts from her 1940s-’50s films are well-chosen. Maria Schell did not hold her looks into old age, the way that someone like Katharine Hepburn could still look extraordinary at 70. In fact, Schell looks now like an ordinary hausfrau, but the clips give a sense of what she conveyed in her youth.
What we learn of her life is patchy and vague, though we can infer that she was unhappy in marriage, and attempted suicide once.
Her Hollywood experiences in the 1950s did not take, either. However, she touchingly recalls Gary Cooper, her co-star in “The Hanging Tree,” as her favorite leading man, admiring his calm and self-assuredness.
“My Sister Maria” is of interest to film buffs, even though it left me wanting to know more about its subject. There are many moving moments between sister and brother. But Maximilian Schell’s bizarre approach, while highly personal, keeps this tribute obscure.
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