Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Audacity to be Free

Novelist and psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) was a woman ahead of her time. In documentarian Cordula Kablitz-Post's attractive feature film debut a framing device finds the 72-year-old (Nicole Heesters) dictating her memoirs to ardent admirer Ernst Pfeiffer (Matthias Lier) in 1933, while the primary narrative illustrates her past. In transitions between time periods, she appears to walk through old photographs and postcards. As a girl growing up in St. Petersburg, Lou longed to partake in the same activities as boys. Before her father (Peter Simonischek) died, he encouraged Lou to do whatever she wanted, from climbing trees to studying philosophy (Lou’s mother was more traditional). Once 16-year-old Lou (Liv Lisa Fries) found a tutor, she applied herself to her studies, but after he proposed, she rejected his offer and "renounced all erotic experiences." Lou (now played by Katharina Lorenz) went on to study religion and philosophy in Zurich, but took a break when she developed bronchitis. Instead, she studied with her friends, Paul Rée and Friedrich Nietzsche, even after she rejected their respective proposals. Although she had an affair with poet Rainer Marie Rilke, who changed her mind about sex, she married literature scholar Friedrich Carl Andreas for practical reasons. Her first few novels met with a receptive audience, although she had to write under a man's name since her publisher didn’t think they would sell otherwise. She then turned to psychoanalysis after meeting Sigmund Freud. "I was never able to make compromises," she tells Pfeiffer, who would become the executor of her estate, in a statement that nicely sums up the complex, underappreciated life that Kablitz-Post depicts with such care. Recommended. (K. Fennessy)