I'll bet when you had to read "Faust" in your college survey of European literature, you didn't realize that its author -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -- led as adventurous an early life as the young William Shakespeare depicted in "Shakespeare In Love." If you did, you should be writing scripts for the movies! For that is the premise of a charming new film from Germany, very loosely-based on the early life of the great Germanic poet/author/color theorist that recently opened Stateside. If the parallels to the previous Oscar-winner aren't blatant enough, the American distributor wants to make it perfectly clear, by changing the name from the German title "Goethe!" to "Young Goethe in Love." (clever!)
Despite the obvious debt to the previous film, Philipp Stolzl's film works for many of the same reasons: It is fast-paced, witty, well-acted by an attractive young cast (led by Alexander Fehling from "Inglourious Basterds" in the title role), and it's FUN! The story follows the young Goethe's apprenticeship in a law court in a 'backwater' German town, where he falls in love with a sensitive (she sings in the church choir), redheaded beauty named Charlotte (a fresh-faced Miriam Stein). Of course, it doesn't end well, or the world wouldn't have Goethe's first blockbuster novel, "The Sorrows of Young Werther," written in a love-sick frenzy from a jail cell (or so this film would have you believe). I'm sure any similarity to the early days of the historical Goethe are purely coincidental, but it cannot be any more fictionalized than the Bard's story. I don't mind the dramatic license taken by either film, because they both entertain. It's about time this German literary great got the Amadeus-Shakespeare treatment on the big screen.
