Germany, 1933, seventy-two year old Lou Andreas-Salomé (Nicole Heesters, KAMIKAZE 89) is living quietly in the care of Mariechen (Katharina Schüttler, FREE FALL) in the suburbs but is nonetheless perturbed by the rise of Nazism in the immediate outside world when she is approached by young student Ernst Pfeiffer (Matthias Lier) ostensibly seeking help for a psychoanalytical help for a friend but it soon becomes apparent that he is the one in need of counsel. Lou has retired from practice but realizes that Ernst would be better treated in a casual manner by getting him to a open up while otherwise distracted. His knowledge of her oeuvre is such that he seems the ideal candidate to assist her in putting her memoirs to paper, and her story takes Pfeiffer from her childhood in St. Petersberg where only her father (Peter Simonischek, TONI ERDMANN) encouraged her in un-feminine scholarly pursuits, and his early death found her as a teenager (Liv Lisa Fries) escaping from her oppressive mother (Petra Morzé, IMPORT/EXPORT) through the philosophical instruction of married pastor Hendrik Gillot (Marcel Hensema) who introduces her alphabetically to Aristotle and onwards. At the age of twenty, Lou (Katharina Lorenz) starts her university education in Switzerland, but her poor health puts her at the mercy of her mother who cancels her studies and takes her to Rome for a change of scenery. There, she meets philosopher Paul Rée (Philipp Hauß) and his friend Friedrich Nietzsche (Alexander Scheer) but resists their romantic overtures in favor of founding an "academic commune" scandalizing not only her mother when she resolves to "study privately" under them but also Nietzsche's sister (Katrin Hansmeier); however, it is eventually Nietzsche's own possessiveness that drives her away to rejoin jealous Paul in Berlin where she meets orientalist Friedrich Carl Andreas (Merab Ninidze, NOWHERE IN AFRICA) with whom she enters into a "sham marriage" that is more socially advantageous to him than to her despite his family name. She appears to find an ideal partner in poet Rainer Maria Rilke (Julius Feldmeier), but even that relationship is doomed as much by his own dependence as her will to be free.

A fascinating figure of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an accomplished author and the first female psychoanalyst - she is seen undergoing psychoanalysis and corresponding with Sigmund Freud (Harald Schrott) - Lou Andreas-Salomé is under-served here by a two-hour biopic that is about as informative as a Wikipedia entry (writer/director Cordula Kablitz-Post's prior credits have been television documentaries). The film moves along from event to event without any sense of Andreas-Salomé's struggles beyond the givens of family, the church, and possessive/jealous/neurotic males while relying on the flashback structure to impart additional information beyond her recollection - including Nietzsche's sister later publishing a book slandering her as well as accusing her and Rée of being Jews - while Pfeiffer (later biographer and executor of her estate) prods the narrative forward and questions the veracity of her recollections while possibly flattering himself in the final scene with her tacit blessing of his maintaining her legacy. Handsomely photographed on a low budget with Andreas-Salomé and other a characters moving through digitally-rendered post-cards (with two-dimensional static figures with no more depth than most of the supporting players), the film at best provides historical and biographical context to Liliana Cavani's more interesting BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL which focused on the intellectual "threesome" of Andreas-Salomé (Dominique Sanda, UNE CHAMBRE EN VILLE), Nietzsche (Erland Josephson, NOSTALGHIA), and Rée (Robert Powell, THE SURVIVOR).