Synopsis
Before Dawn charts the years of exile in the life of famous Jewish Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, his inner struggle for the "right attitude" towards the events in war torn Europe and his search for a new home.
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Cast
- Josef HaderStefan Zweig
- Barbara SukowaFriderike Zweig
- Aenne SchwarzLotte Zweig
- Matthias BrandtErnst Feder
- Charly HübnerEmil Ludwig
- André SzymanskiJoseph Brainin
- Nicolau BreynerLeopold Stern
- Lenn KudrjawizkiSamuel Malamud
- Tómas LemarquisLefèvre
- Naomi KraussErna Feder
Recommendations
- 90
Village Voice
Aenne Schwarz and Barbara Sukowa give strong performances as the author’s second and first wives, respectively, but this is Hader’s movie. His is one of the great performances of recent years. - 90
The Hollywood Reporter
Much of the feature’s quietly accumulated emotional power derives from the fact that viewers have to connect some of the dots themselves. Indeed, just like in the subject’s own work, the imagination of the audience is as important an ingredient for the final result as what is actually written or suggested. - 90
Los Angeles Times
"Stefan Zweig" is only Schrader's second film as a director, but, armed with clear ideas of what she wanted to convey and how she wanted to convey it, she's made a movie that allows its actors to fully inhabit their characters in a potent but low-key way. - 75
IndieWire
Schrader’s direction is unobtrusive but agile, as though she considers it her duty to provide a cinematic soapbox for Zweig and politely exit the spotlight. - 70
The New York Times
One need not admire Zweig’s writing to recognize the worth of this thoughtful treatment of one of the countless real-life tragedies of 20th-century history. - 63
Slant Magazine
The film hovers between being a straight-up biopic of Zweig and a diagnosis of neoliberalism's recent ceding to neofascist policy and nationalistic fervor. - 63
Washington Post
"Farewell to Europe” is a little like Zweig himself: smart, overly fastidious and remote to a fault. By avoiding Zweig’s inner life, his eventual collapse seems all the more perfunctory. - 60
Variety
This articulate, formally immaculate portrait proves less compelling in practice than it does in principle: Over-burdened at the outset with extraneous ceremonial detail and starchy speechifying, the film takes a dry, acolytes-only approach before later, more domestically focused chapters raise the body temperature of proceedings.
