User Reviews

"Die Glasbläserin" is a German television movie from 2016, so still relatively new, and like most other small screen films it runs for 1.5 hours and the director here is Christiane Balthasar. The writer is Léonie-Claire Breinersdorfer and she adapted the novel by Petra Durst-Benning for the screen here. Some pretty long names. Anyway, for Breinersdorfer it was the most recent effort to this date. The cast includes some known names. At least german film buffs have m´certainly come across Heyer, Ehrich, Gwisdek, Dinda and a few others. For television, it is not a bad cast I would say. This one takes us way back in time into the world of two sister who after the death of their parents enter into a career of glassblowing, which is a big problem because back then people were not too familiar with women working and having their own independent careers, completely aside from the unusual profession. So, there are the usuall struggles too. The violent husband of one of the girls is not amused at all by what she does. And there are also business and emotional struggles involving the other sister when her boss, who initially seems a bit like her mentor, has a most unsuaul way in showing her what he really thinks about her. Yes, this is a film that is a lot about gender discrimination too, I mean real gender discrimination, not the one that is stuffed up these days. There are some pretty sad moments too involving (not just implied) rape, but they kept them from becoming too graphic to make sure younger audiences can watch this film as well. Not the very young obviously, but they would not care anyway. Besides, with period pieces like this, there is also always major focus on costumes, set decorations and makeup and I think while it's not outstanding or anything, it fits the occasion pretty nicely. Here and there it maybe gets a bit too soap-opera-ish, but it's tolerable and the good moments are far more frequent than the weak moments in my opinion. And truly bad moments are honestly not there at all, which definitely cannot be said about every German (television) movie. In any case, let me add that I have not read the novel that this film is based on, so I cannot talk a lot about improvements and weaknesses between the two or changes in terms of the story, but I would be surprised if the book was considerably worse. Now as for the cast, Heyer I am usually not that big a fan of and I would not say she won me over, but she was okay all in all and could have been a worse lead actress. Ehrich I like and I think she played her role well too. Gwisdek I had some doubts which were rather about the way the character was written than his performance as he is basically always solid, even if his approach is usually not too different, but the longer the film went he managed to win me over more and more. So I think it is a good film, maybe one that is more for female than male audiences, but you don't see too often good period pieces from my country and thatg alone is reason enough for everybody to check this one out if they love the genre. Dialogue writing is also better than usual for a German movie. Why not go for it instead of a Keira Knightley period piece for example. Thumbs up for "The Glass Blower".