Review: ‘Fatherland’ by Paweł Pawlikowski | The viewer

Part period, part political prelude, by Paweł Pawlikowski Fatherland concludes the Polish director’s trilogy set in a World War II setting. Following black and white dramas Ida (2013) and The Cold War (2018), the filmmaker’s latest—which won him the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, paired with. La Bola Negra– it’s easy on the surface, and it comes from talking about academic freedom. However, it hides, within its short running time of 82 minutes, many ideas about the state of the world.

Set in 1949, the story follows two state visits by the famous German novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) to both sides of the German Inner Border, a few years before the construction of the Berlin Wall. However, between a personal tragedy, his strained relationship with his children, and the emergence of a dictatorship, Thomas’s long-awaited return from exile in America becomes difficult, in a story that explores the nature of freedom and artistic and personal oppression.

The film is an amazing trio, between Zischler’s strong center as the Nobel laureate—who tries to hide his extreme political views, until he can no longer contain them—and the actors who play his well-known older children. Sandra Hüller (this year’s best actress winner in Berlin) plays his daughter, fan and translator Erika, her father’s shadow, who revisits a broken Germany after years of fleeing the Nazis. They are similar in many respects, except that Thomas rejects his “absurd” son, Klaus (August Diehl), whose heartbreaking phone call with Erika the film opens with.

We first meet Klaus as he sits at the foot of his bed in a cramped Cannes apartment, with his lover still asleep, and he’s regaling his sister with his poignant views on Germany’s post-Nazi reconstruction efforts. Klaus’ fractured identity as a German man is what he equates to the fracture in his family life, though it’s not a far-fetched story. The two ideas are deeply connected, as he calls German “the language in which lies were first invented,” before discussing the ways in which Thomas excels at this task.

Klaus doesn’t interact with Thomas on screen, and rarely shares scenes with Erika—mostly, the movie cuts between them, connecting them in space in ghostly ways—ensuring that the film’s plot helps establish the trio’s troubled dynamics early on. This domestic chaos soon colors the political visits made by the father-daughter couple, first to US-controlled Frankfurt, where Thomas receives the Goethe prize under the watchful eye of the CIA, and then to Weimar in the Eastern Soviet Bloc, to celebrate the 200th birthday of the Johansake prize, author vonthe Wolfe

During these twin visits, Thomas flirts with (or rather, openly admits) the possibility that his words may eventually be distorted and his works turned into propaganda. Whether or not he’ll back down—and to what extent—is a matter of personal question, but the continuing divide between the “first” and “second” worlds is on every character’s mind. Klaus, for example, considers this mountain to be a choice between “Stalin and Mickey Mouse,” a division that is evident in the visit itself, as the obvious and trivial extremes of each group permeate every conversation.

Despite being an honored guest on both sides of the border, there is a sense that Thomas is being held by an unseen force at all times. For example, he is placed between two of Richard Wagner’s grandchildren in a social circle—who insist on separating his work without consequence from its Nazi share—and in private moments, Thomas rarely expresses his grief to his daughter Erika when he conveys the news of death to the family. The three-dimensional selection of characters’ perspectives leaves them between a rock, a hard place and a frying pan, as it were Fatherland it was an echo of many of the points facing society today, between the iron grip of right-wing fascism and the choice between free market and socialist ideologies—not to mention, the ways art can be taken and misused by anyone with an agenda. As the world approaches the brink of inevitable revolution, what will any of us be willing or unwilling to do?

The film may not show its strong commitment to the current political climate (besides the rejection of soft de-Nazism in the form of silent reintegration), but its setting is a deeply emotional political moment. Perhaps this story should have been more detailed, in its examination of the way its characters look—that Erika and Thomas themselves might have been gangsters is mentioned only in the footnotes, making Klaus’ rejection more difficult—but in the process, Pawlikowski changes. Fatherland he entered a solid line of themes and ideas that he has played with for over a decade.

Like both of his previous films, about Polish actors revisiting recent history, Fatherland is the tale of a family returning “home” to an unusually divided Germany—a feeling that also defines their relationship to each other. And like The Cold Warit is equally about the compromise between art as an expression of the soul and political propaganda, something that Thomas faces as a mere fact of his existence in this new and unfamiliar world. Pawlikowski himself has long considered a move to the right across Europe, and given his past as a Cold War exile from Poland—who lived briefly in West Germany, even less—his opinion is described as having grown up ping-ponging between different mistrusts. (That sure does a number on the personal sense.)

However, that Fatherland can be drawn in a complex way in the personal life of the creator is not a good thing in itself, although it may open another meaning of it. The film’s emotional power—while delayed in design, as Zischler peels back Thomas’ layers with Erika’s help—is defined by its aesthetic, which sees Pawlikowski and ace cinematographer Łukasz Żal create eye-catching 4:3 frames that consistently separate Manns from people and ideas. Only a handful of loose partners are allowed to fully enter their orbit.

Clinging to what one believes can be a lonely road, especially when you’re balancing your defenses. This path is made bumpy by unspoken barriers between generations, but this quiet rupture is not just a metaphor for the wider world. Rather, they are an integral part of political life, serving as bridges between different eras and political eras. Fatherland it can be refined by restraint, but its static frames contain the weight and movement of history, making it sound, in its most intense moments, monumental and poetic.

More on Film Festivals