Critic Reviews

Salomé would be better served by a story that focuses more explicitly on her intellectual life rather than on her personal one, but considering how stodgy biopics can be, Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to Be Free offers a mostly engaging portrait of a charismatic and brilliant figure.

Though Cordula Kablitz-Post's feature debut Lou Andreas-Salome, The Audacity to be Free views this very unconventional woman through the conventions of the biopic, its drama benefits from a viewer's ignorance of her story.

Director Cordula Kablitz-Post, who scripted with Susanne Hertel, effectively presents Lou as neither heroine nor genius but as a flawed, complex, fascinating pacesetter.

Beyond what the film says and represents, it’s also well made.

While trying to save her from being considered as merely an inspiration to the great men around her, the script inadvertently reinforces this impression.

Throughout, the writer and director Cordula Kablitz-Post asserts Andreas-Salomé’s commitment to her own independence. But Ms. Kablitz-Post’s focus on Andreas-Salomé’s suitors has the effect of chaining the early feminist’s legacy to exactly the patriarchal conventions she claims to reject.