Horst in Translation ([email protected])
"Gruppenbild mit Dame" or "Portrait de groupe avec dame" or "Group Portrait with a Lady" is a co-production between France and West Germany and both languages can also be heard in the original version, but the dominant language is German, so you may need subtitles for this Romy Schneider movie. The director is Aleksandar Petrovic and it is one of his late career efforts and something different from him at the age of slightly under 50 as he was basically only active in Eastern Europe otherwise. He was also one of the people adapting Heinrich Böll's novel for the screen here and Böll was actually one of them too. That's why I find it especially disappointing that this turned out a fairly weak movies as films with the writer of the base material also adapting his own work are usually better and I am sure the base material here was better than the film. I am also confused by Romy Schneider's German Film Award here. I am not too sure if she was lead and even if she was, then this film is really an ensemble performance as the focus was on a whole lot of characters and to me it feels somewhat wrong to emphasize her performance and ignore the rest (such as Oscar nominee Brad Dourif). According to IMDb, this film runs for 107 minutes, but all the versions I found were roughly 90 minutes long. As a whole, Schneider's youth and magic had gone here already. She was almost 40 and only 5 years away from her death. Sometimes (not only at the very end) she looks like a much older woman here and I find it a bit sad as I remember her wild spirit and youth from the Sissi films oh so well. But back to this one here. My final verdict is that this is just one of very many German films about World War II and also in 1977 people were still trying to come to terms with what happened and the medium film was used frequently for that purpose. Nothing truly stands out about this film from almost 40 years ago. I do not recommend the watch.
