Die Geträumten

Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan are twenty-two and twenty-seven when they meet in Vienna in 1948. Both are poets but have different backgrounds (Celan, a Jew from Czernowitz, lost his parents in a German camp in Ukraine), and different degrees of recognition. The love letters they exchange are marked by distance and, increasingly, by Celan’s paranoia. The Dreamed Ones brings back their searing beauty as it films two young actors recording them in a studio, standing in front of their microphone. The visual compositions of cameraman Johannes Hammel translate the paradoxical intimacy between the two poets. Little by little, the actors – Anja Plaschg (a reputed artist on the young Austrian music scene) and Laurence Rupp (a member of the Burgtheater) – seem to become captivated. Their cigarette breaks reveal the concerns of their age, but the Bachmann/Celan letters slowly permeate their relationship, without ever being expressed in words. What they exchange in their looks, their tones of voice, the way they pronounce a prose that is not of their generation makes it easy to understand why Ruth Beckermann – who originally intended to mix the readings with places where the lovers had lived – refocused The Dreamed Ones on this graceful Kammerspiel in which epistolary romance nurtures the documentary present. (Charlotte Garson)