The story of a pioneering, cold and fickle groupie, this movie is one to avoid. Vienna 1902-1919. A good setting for any movie -- it's doubtful that the moviegoer is more familiar with any other period of twentieth century (we have countless monographs, full-scale biographies, novels, histories, museum exhibitions, and concerts devoted to Schnitzler and Musil, Joseph Roth and Grillparzer, von Hoffmansthal and Mahler, Bruckner and Freud, Kokoschka and the other expressionists, Klimt and Jung and the rise of Schoenberg and Jung, Webern and Adler, -- as well as weekly publication for the last few decades of studies of the rise of political anti-semitism - Schnorer, etc.). Yet: a) the movie wastes a few hours to uninformatively tell us that Mahler was a composer and conductor (!), that Kokoschka painted and sculpted un-pretty things (!), that Gropius was an architect who speaks once in praise of form and the absence of adornment, and that Werfel liked to sing and demonstrated against the government. That's it. There really is no more insight into these people.
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b) we see a deeply unsympathetic woman who, for no real reason we can see, has an affair with an architect the first time she's away from her children and husband Mahler (telling him - comically - that he "forced her into the man's arms"! and expressing no remorse), then informs the architect into whose arms she was "forced" that she would not stay with her husband - when Mahler is dead, she shacks up again with the architect and resumes her fornication but then decides to go after a painter. We aren't told why she loses her interest in the architect. Later, big with child with the painter who deeply loves her, she kills the child and abandons the artist as World War I begins. Why? We don't learn. She says to one that she was "suffocated". Really? We don't see it.
So, when our painter returns from the War, he sees that she's returned to being the concubine of yet another! And is pregnant again with that man's child.
Yet we never ever see what draws any of the men to her - except that she aggressively goes after them like any groupie - whether she's married or unmarried, whether they wish it or not.
This is truly an anti-feminist story about a woman who found her identity only in that of men - and frantically went from one to another, willing to be sexually used to gain proximity.
In an age when so many women made their names famous through their work (Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, Colette, dozens of others in the arts), Alma Schindler Moll Mahler Gropius Werfel managed only to lengthen her own by lying on her back and encourage famous men to go ahead. It's hard to find this appealing.
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