The Dreamed Ones review – a poetic postwar love affair revisited

Austrian film-maker Ruth Beckermann has created a cerebral chamber piece from the love letters of postwar poet Paul Celan, whose parents perished in a Nazi concentration camp, and Ingeborg Bachmann, the author whose father had been a Nazi party member. Performers Laurence Rupp and Anja Plaschg play versions of themselves, reading out selections of the letters into studio microphones, apparently for a radio programme. We see them taking a thoughtful cigarette break together, or getting lunch. Maybe their own relationship is being influenced by Celan and Bachmann’s? Most of the film consists of their faces in closeup, reading the text. It is an intriguing exchange, like a controlled but dreamily unhappy dialogue which can’t represent the length and rhythm of the silences that existed between each letter: Celan was hurt by these silences. The historical issues between them are never alluded to, except at the end, when Celan is infuriated by an antisemitic remark in a German review of his great poem Death Fugue, and then by Bachmann’s calmly dismissive attitude to his outrage. It could also be that he was not entirely pleased at Bachmann’s growing literary prestige. This reminded me a little of Margarethe Von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt, which was itself a bit like a radio play. It also reminded me of Julia Leigh’s erotic nightmare Sleeping Beauty, in which one sex scene is bizarrely preceded by a discussion of Ingeborg Bachmann’s work. This is more forensic than erotic.