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
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