"Die bleierne Zeit" or "Marianne & Juliane" or "The German Sisters" is a West German 105-minute film from 1981, so it has its 35th anniversary this year. The major plot in this film is all about women's rights, so it is fitting that this was made by Margarethe von Trotta, one of Germany's most successful female filmmakers. She worked on several occasions during her career with Barbara Sukowa and this is just one of these. Sukowa won a German Film Award for her portrayal here, her first, and she was around the age of 30 at this point. Her co-lead, Jutta Lampe, who was also nominated, but lost to Sukowa, was a bit older already. They play sisters here that both fight for rights of females. One does it as something you could perhaps call a terrorist already, so no surprise that she gets arrested. The other gives it a more reserved approach as she is a writer. The main male character, the boyfriend of one of the two women, is played by Rüdiger Vogler whom you may know from Wim Wenders' early works perhaps. This movie was really successful back then as it won many awards, including Best Picture at the German Film Awards that year. But, almost ironically given the film's topic, von Trotta did not get the Best Director trophy. My personal opinion about this film is not too positive. I think Lampe did a good job and if anybody deserved an award for it, then her. But Sukowa, who always plays the same characters and shows the same mannerisms, has been overrated by awards bodies for decades. Admittedly, here she is not as bad as in some of her worst work, but also far from good and certainly not deserving of any individual honors. The script is so-so. You probably need to care a whole lot about emancipation to see the good outweigh the bad in this one. I must say that I was never really too much interested in the main characters or what happened to them the way the story was depicted. That's why I have chosen to give it a thumbs-down. The German Film Awards got it wrong that year. It may have been the right choice not to submit this one to the Oscars. I don't recommend the watch.

Two sisters both fight for women's rights. Juliane is a journalist and Marianne a terrorist. When Marianne is jailed, Juliane feels obligated to help her despite their differing views on how to live.

The screenplay is a fictionalized account of the true lives of Christiane and Gudrun Ensslin. Gudrun, a member of the Red Army Faction, was found dead in her prison cell in Stammheim in 1977. Although this story is not well-known outside of Germany, it does illustrate the tensions of Germany during the Cold War.

This film marked the first time that Margarethe von Trotta worked with Barbara Sukowa. They would go on to work on six more films together. One could fairly argue that von Trotta launched Sukowa's career, leading her to work with such noted directors as von Trier, Cimino, Cronenberg and others.

"Marianne and Juliane" was well received and became a platform for Von Trotta as a director of the new German cinema. Though she was not as highly recognized as her male counterparts, the study of the more human side of contemporary political issues (like terrorism in this case) became her focus. Anyone who is interested in German films of the 70s-90s would do well to seek her out, as her work overlapped nicely with her contemporaries.

Two sisters, Juliane (Robinski) and Marianne (Biedermann),are brought up by strict Christian upbringing in the post WWII West Germany, the elder Juliane stands out with her recalcitrant attitude whether facing their priest father or retorting her straitlaced schoolmarm, which pales the younger, blond-haired Marianne almost into a meek lamb.

But when they grow up, mysteriously their respective personalities take a drastic about-face, Juliane (Lampe) is a feminist journalist employed in a woman magazine crusading for women's civil rights movement, earning a stable life and having sustained a ten-year relationship with her boyfriend Wolfgang (Vogler); whereas, Marianne (Sukowa),after a failed relationship with Wiener (Bondy),she leaves him and disowns their young son, pursues an extremely radical way to fight and becomes a remember of the Baader-Meinhof Group - in fact, director Margarethe von Trotta bases her character on the group's real-life intellectual head Gudrun Ensslin (1940-1977).

In von Trotta's Golden Lion winner MARIANNE & JULIANE, which establishes her as a vanguard in the New German Cinema movement, the vicissitude of life plumes with a tangy whiff through the events alternating between present and past, between the adult sisters and their younger selves. Irrevocably and outwardly divided by their disparate political views, what remains indissoluble inside is their consanguineous sororal bond, especially when Marianne is interned during the German Autumn, it is through Juliane's many visits to her in the prison, their ideological discrepancy slowly gives way to a more viscerally stirring blood-is-thicker-than-water communion.

By playing out the story exclusively through Juliane's point-of-view, von Trotta consciously evades a key question, what have Marianne done? All we are led to understand is that she is a bomb-throwing terrorist, but what is the damage? One must possess enough knowledge about that particularly turbulent epoch in Germany, to have a sober assessment of Marianne/Gudrun's action, without that requisite, a fathomless feeling of ambiguity cannot be dissipated. That, might exactly be von Trotta's intention, to elucidate the formative forces that in the last resort, alter one's perspective and even personality, and she has no bone about laying out the macabre truth, the sisters watching Alain Resnais' NIGHT AND FOG (1956) is a defining moment, so is during the visitation, what we last see of Marianne is and its connotation, more or less, on the same heinous quotient.

von Trotta maps out a distinguished complexity in the aftermath, Julianne's relationship with Wolfgang is dissolved inevitably (Vogler, taking on the unsupportive boyfriend role with profuse outpourings of frustration and self-interest),no justice is on the horizon even when Juliane has evidence to controvert the official statement of Marianne's ostensible suicide, and bringing back her only bloodline in the final act brilliantly shows up von Trotta's crystal-clear discernment and what a fine fabulist she is, the damage passes on to her progeny no matter what, can any child survive from such a harrowing history? Fat chance!

Both actresses playing the titular characters are phenomenal, Lampe composedly conveys Juliane's frame of mind in trickles of her oscillating emotional struggle between an ideology she cannot espouse and a sister to whom she holds dearest. Sukowa, in her second feature film, plays down her striking beauty and breathes out every single line with a steely determination and precision, simultaneously mythologizing and personifying Marianne, who can drink the Kool-Aid to her cause, but deep down, her mortal fear and desperation are fervidly expressed through Sukowa's fiery if appositely equivocal impersonation.

In a nutshell, von Trotta's film is a steadfast, rigorous feminist disquisition on the troubled mentality of a historic time in Germany and rings true in every aspect of the emotional spectrum, a fearless legacy in German cinema left to be appreciated and reappraised from time to time.