The Bronte Sisters

1979 ‘Les Sœurs Brontë’ Directed by André Téchiné

In a small presbytery in Yorkshire, England, living under the watchful eyes of their aunt and father, a strict Anglican pastor, the Bronte sisters write their first works and quickly become literary sensations.

Isabelle Adjani Marie-France Pisier Isabelle Huppert Pascal Greggory Patrick Magee Hélène Surgère Roland Bertin Alice Sapritch Xavier Depraz Adrian Brine Julian Curry Rennee Goddard Jean Sorel Roland Barthes

Alternative Title

Les Soeurs Brontë

drama

120 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by sydney ★★ 2

very beautiful but way too french and way too much branwell. the vibes are all wrong.
Review by russman ★★

Ah, those famous French authors the Brontë sisters.
Review by Patrick Pryor ★★

How can a movie where Isabelle Huppert, Isabelle Adjani, and Marie-France Pisier play the Brontë sisters be so DULL? I love the desolate frozen heath location ripped straight from the pages of Wuthering Heights, and the actresses do the best with what limited material they're given. But why does this movie focus so much on the fuckup Brontë brother, Branwell? Who asked for a Branwell biopic? If Souers Brontë actually delivered on its title and focused more on how isolation, suffocating patriarchy, and repressed desire shaped the authors' lives and work it could've been a slam dunk! Also, dirt slathered Emily Brontë scraping through the moors in boy clothes and hiding scrap poems in her pockets. . . hello.
Review by 🌸 ★★★★½

isabelle adjani as emily bronte is the content i need to validate my existence
Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★

38/100
Strike one: biopic. Strike two: biopic about writers. Strike three: Biopic about writers who led utterly uneventful lives, apart from their writing. (Plus all the Brontës died young, so at a certain point you're just waiting for the entire cast to keel over.) Without robust subject matter, Téchiné tends toward tasteful tedium, and here he only comes alive when depicting Branwell's ill-fated affair with (yes, this is historically true, albeit not known with 100% certainty) Mrs. Robinson. Emily wanders the heath ("ah, so that's where" kill me), Charlotte mostly frets, and Anne is about as vivid in this film as she is in literary history. Hopefully Apocalypse Now screened immediately after it at Cannes '79 and napalmed its feeble memory.
Review by PacificNil ★★½

"Die Schwestern Brontë" erzählt von der kreativ bedeutendsten Phase der Brontë-Schwestern und ihres Bruders; das berühmteste Werk, "Sturmhöhe" (1847), mehrfach verfilmt, stammt von Emily Brontë. Da der Film 1979 auf dem Festival in Cannes mit geringem Erfolg gezeigt wurde, blieb dem Film ein deutscher Kinostart verwährt und wurde ein Jahr später im Fernsehen ausgestrahlt. Die braunstichigen Farben, in denen der Film seine Innenaufnahmen präsentiert und die sturmumwitterten Fels- und Heidelandschaften wirken zwar stimmungsvoll, scheinen jedoch wie mit dem Holzhammer in den Film eingewirkt, um auf Emily Brontës Dichtung zu verweisen. Das stocksteife Schauspiel, das das Leben von bürgerlichen Frauen im 19 Jahrhundert wohl realistisch zeigt, aber in einem Film Befremden verursacht und kaum Spannung oder der Identifikation des Zuschauers mit den Figuren ermöglicht, wird durch unfreiwillig komische Dialoge, die zum Inhalt des Films und zu den gleichzeitig gezeigten düsteren Bildern überhaupt nicht passen, ergänzt.
Review by iwatch ★★★★★

fantastique!
I've been waiting to watch this version of the brontes for simply ages. Think I've seen the rest - the hollywood one; the 70s yorkshire tv series, the recent disappointment that was To Walk Invisible and now this...
Of course I'm a bronte fan but as time has gone by I've found that even tho I like the literary adaptations, my real love is for the actual story of these sisters - because basically it's got it all. Isolated windswept location; imaginary lands; genius; unrequited love; secrets; hardships; triumphs; death; grief; three women walking round a table reading to one another; female friendships; tragedy; a wastrel brother who garners all the attention; beautiful poetry just waiting to be discovered;…
Review by David Flowers ★★★★★

An early masterpiece by Téchiné, heavy on stifling interiors and gloomy exteriors. The choice of imagery, from the sisters in heavy nightgowns navigating dark corridors to Isabelle Adjani holding an umbrella in a rain-swept cemetery, makes the whole thing feel like a kind of ghost story without any literal ghosts. In fact, the mood is almost comically gothic at times, but it's still wonderful nonetheless. Despite all the dramatic compositions, the defining image for me was a recurring simple two shot of Huppert and Adjani seated at a table reading and collaborating on letters. It would be tempting to frame their literary ambitions as a liberating way of keeping their minds free of life's drudgery, but Téchiné is wise to stress how those endeavors end up being little more than impotent protests. A haunting, mysterious, and beautiful film.
Review by CEL ★★★

Du cinéma bourgeois et poussiéreux comme on l’aime!
Review by J ★★½

Isabelle Huppert.
The Brontë sisters.
a combination of people that I put in high regard and it seems to me a dream come true but sadly this is kinda dull not because the Brontës' lives are bleak per se but because this adaptation tries too hard to be poetic and to mirror the Gothic setting in the sisters' novels. it also has a habit of hinting on things instead of directly depicting them which is nice but is done excessively. also, it feels so weird to hear them talk in french and then say they don't speak french that well. I laughed quite a bit. Charlotte is very strange (I know she's strange but here she's ten times stranger than…
Review by Peachy_Keen ★★★

Why was it called the Bronte Sisters if 70% of it was about their boring brother? Isabelle Adjani in boy clothes roaming the moores and damning love, give me a whole movie of that please.
Review by Dmitry_Karpyuk ★★★

Очень красиво во всей серости и унылости английских сельских пейзажей. Пизье и Аджани классные, особенно вторая. И особенно когда она словно готовится к фильму Жулавски и издает страшные звуки.

Recent reviews

Review by Alex F ★★★

Movie should've been titled BROntë because it focused so heavily on fcking Branwell
Review by henryadeson

Best of the French despoiling the best of the English. Serlian windows partout. Roland Barthes plays Thackeray wtf
Review by StiwiWonda ★★★½

André Téchiné
LES SOEURS BRONTË
DIE SCHWESTERN BRONTË
Haworth in Yorkshire, um 1840: Die Brontë-Schwestern Emily (Isabelle Adjani), Anne (Isabelle Huppert) und Charlotte (Marie-France Pisier) leben gemeinsam mit ihrem Bruder Branwell (Pascal Greggory) und ihrem Vater Patrick (Patrick Magee) in der Einöde Englands.
Alle vier Kinder nutzen ihr künstlerisches Talent, um dem freudlosen und ärmlichen Dasein im väterlichen Pfarrhaus zu entkommen. Während Branwell jedoch als Künstler scheitert, sind seine Schwestern wesentlich erfolgreicher.
Heimlich arbeiten sie an ihren schriftstellerischen Meisterwerken. Emily schreibt den Roman "Sturmhöhe", Charlotte verfasst den Klassiker "Jane Eyre", und die stille und zurückgezogene Anne arbeitet an einem Gedichtband – alle jedoch zunächst nur ganz privat für sich.
Als sie beschließen ihre Manuskripte Verlegern anzubieten, legen sich männliche Pseudonyme…
Review by Bernardo Soares ★★

I'm not a Téchiné fan anyway, but his traits become all the more jarring in this historical context. His tendency to refuse a center to his films, which occasionaly seem to divert their main focus to follow other characters, feels bizarre and shapeless here (no reason is given to me as to why we should care about the Brontë brother). Not to mention his usual economy in introducing narrative events, whereby he suggests them at the end of a given scene only to immediately follow them in the next one in a much later stage. Then again, I guess that's better than announcing Anne's death the way it's done here: a scene where Huppert complains about a sharp pain at…
Review by RinconCine1235 ★★★★

Podríamos decir que esta película es la cotidianidad de la familia de un párroco protestante, con tres hijas (que, en la realidad, eran cinco) y un hijo, en mitad de la nada de la campiña inglesa.
A eso podríamos añadir que utiliza la estructura de narración de una novela (comienza como esas grandes obras donde uno de sus personajes rememora los acontecimientos que desembocan en una gran historia), con una planificación totalmente teatral de escenas y una visión pictórica muy ajustada al estilo de David Friedrich o William Turner.
Además, su fiel retrato de la sociedad de clases de la época (la secuencia de la cena en casa de los Robinson) y de la férreas reglas sociales establecidas por los…
Review by cout ★★★★

ok que o filme nao foi exatamente como eu esperava mas um filme com a isabelle adjani interpretando a emily bronte e a isabelle huppert interpretando a anne bronte foi feito pra mim so pra mim!
Review by jacob i. ★★

Isabelle Adjanuary
8/10
This has no right to be 2 hours long. The biggest issue being; the film is called The Brontë Sisters, yet it opens on their brother, and spends most of the running time with him. It occasionally reverts focus back to the sisters, but the structure is fragmented into a disjointed back-and-forth between them becoming “instant sensations” (which doesn’t happen until after the first 80 minutes, so by definition that statement from the synopsis is false), and being completely erased from the story altogether in favor of Branwell Brontë, who is simply not as interesting (or entertaining enough to watch) as the rest of the principle cast. Doesn’t help that biopics in general are an oversaturated, bland, and…
Review by Peachy_Keen ★★★

Why was it called the Bronte Sisters if 70% of it was about their boring brother? Isabelle Adjani in boy clothes roaming the moores and damning love, give me a whole movie of that please.
Review by Jonsnow7u7 ★★★

Quite slow, not much to tell, beautifully filmed but not too interesting plot, of course I'm a fan of those 3 brilliant writers and I only saw the film for them, and of course obviously for Isabelle Huppert and her beautiful face (Isabelle Adjani looks gorgeous in this)
Review by Efiix

jtm Isabelle mais j’dis pas laquelle
Review by PacificNil ★★½

"Die Schwestern Brontë" erzählt von der kreativ bedeutendsten Phase der Brontë-Schwestern und ihres Bruders; das berühmteste Werk, "Sturmhöhe" (1847), mehrfach verfilmt, stammt von Emily Brontë. Da der Film 1979 auf dem Festival in Cannes mit geringem Erfolg gezeigt wurde, blieb dem Film ein deutscher Kinostart verwährt und wurde ein Jahr später im Fernsehen ausgestrahlt. Die braunstichigen Farben, in denen der Film seine Innenaufnahmen präsentiert und die sturmumwitterten Fels- und Heidelandschaften wirken zwar stimmungsvoll, scheinen jedoch wie mit dem Holzhammer in den Film eingewirkt, um auf Emily Brontës Dichtung zu verweisen. Das stocksteife Schauspiel, das das Leben von bürgerlichen Frauen im 19 Jahrhundert wohl realistisch zeigt, aber in einem Film Befremden verursacht und kaum Spannung oder der Identifikation des Zuschauers mit den Figuren ermöglicht, wird durch unfreiwillig komische Dialoge, die zum Inhalt des Films und zu den gleichzeitig gezeigten düsteren Bildern überhaupt nicht passen, ergänzt.
Review by momoe_nakanishi ★★★½

I don’t know much about the Bronte's lives and i still don’t, but i do feel there’s a risk in conflating their stories and heroines with how they really were. But it all had to come from somewhere - some living and experience. Anyway apart from wild and windy moors, things heaped against women’s lives and general bleakness, i didn’t get the feeling this fell to that risk.
This was mostly about their brother, which i guess points to he as the birthright shining hope of the family and they finding their under-esteemed way through what cracks they could find. I liked it. I wish i had a better copy to watch. the subtitles translated Wuthering Heights as ‘gusting summit.’