Part of the period, part of the foreboding, by Paweł Pawlikowski Fatherland concludes the Polish director’s loose trilogy set at the end of World War II. After other black and white dramas Ida (2013) and The Cold War (2018), the director’s latest film – which won him the best director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, tied for Black Ball– is simple on the surface and unfolds with an often academic sincerity. However, it hides, within its scant 82-minute running time, larger reflections on the state of the world.
Set in 1949, the story follows two state visits by the famous German novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) on both sides of the internal German border, a few years before the erection of the Berlin Wall. However, between a personal tragedy, his strained relationship with his children and the specter of authoritarianism, Thomas’ long-awaited return from American exile becomes complicated, in a tale that examines the nature of freedom and artistic and personal oppression.
The film belongs to an outstanding trio of performers, between Zischler’s staunch reserve as a Nobel laureate – who tries to keep a lid on his most passionate political opinions until he can’t contain them anymore – and the actors playing his famous grown children. Sandra Hueller (Winner of this year’s best actress in Berlin) plays his daughter, chaperone and translator Erika, a shadow of her father, who similarly revisits a devastated Germany years after fleeing the Nazis. They are similar in most respects, except for Thomas’ rejection of his “boyish” son, Klaus (August Diehl), whose somber phone call with Erica opens first in the film.
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HOMELAND ★★★ (3/4 stars) |
We first meet Klaus as he sits at the foot of his bed in a cramped apartment in Cannes, as his male lover is still asleep, and he regales his sister with his bitter thoughts on Germany’s efforts at post-Nazi reconstruction. Klaus’ fractured identity as a German is one he compares to the cracks in his family life, though not merely as a distant allegory. The two ideas are intrinsically linked, as he labels German “a language invented for lying,” before discussing the ways in which Thomas is exceptionally good at this particular function.
Klaus doesn’t interact with Thomas on screen and he rarely even shares scenes with Erika at most, the film cuts between them, connecting them across space in ghostly ways – ensuring the film’s editing helps establish the trio’s strained dynamic early on. This domestic turmoil soon colored the political visits undertaken by the father-daughter pair, first to US-controlled Frankfurt, where Thomas received the Goethe Prize under the watchful eye of the CIA, and then to Weimar in the Soviet Eastern Bloc, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of the prize’s namesake, writer and philosopher. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
During these twin visits, Thomas flirts with (or rather passively accepts) the possibility that his words will eventually be twisted and his deeds turned into propaganda. Whether or not he’ll pull back—and to what degree—is a matter of some question, but the constant rift between the “first” and “second” worlds is on every character’s mind. Klaus, for example, considers this precipice a choice between “Stalin and Mickey Mouse,” a dichotomy mirrored in the visits themselves, as each faction’s respective overt and subliminal excess creeps its way into every conversation.
Despite being an honored guest on both sides of the border, there is a sense that Thomas is trapped by unseen forces at every turn. For example, he is adjusted between his two grandchildren Richard Wagner at a social gathering—who insist on a consequential separation of his work from its Nazi appropriation—and in more private moments, Thomas can rarely express his grief to his daughter Erika when she relays the news of a death in the family. The characters’ triple ideological choices leave them between a rock, a hard place, and a frying pan, as if Fatherland were an echo of the many turning points facing society today, between the iron grip of far-right fascism and the choice between the free market and socialist ideologies—not to mention, the ways in which art can be absorbed and misused by anyone with an agenda. As the world teeters on the brink of inevitable transformation, what will any of us be willing or unwilling to do?
The film may not display its unwavering commitments in a contemporary political context (beyond a rejection of soft denazification through peaceful reintegration), but its location is a political moment so large as to be emotionally petrifying. Perhaps the story should have been more detailed, in exploring the views of its characters – that Erika and even Thomas himself may also have been queer, is explained only subtextually, making the latter’s rejection of Klaus even more complicated – but in the process, Pawlikowski transforms Fatherland in a tight channel about intimate themes and ideas he’s been playing with for more than a decade.
Like his two previous films, about Polish characters revisiting recent history, Fatherland is a story of a family whose return “home” to a divided Germany is distinctly foreign—a sensation that defines their relationships with one another. And how The Cold Warit is as much about the compromise between art as spiritual expression and political propaganda, something that Thomas faces as a simple fact of his existence in this new and unfamiliar world. Pawlikowski himself has long had to reckon with violent far-right sentiment across Europe, and given his background as a Cold War Polish exile — who settled for a time in West Germany, no less — his perspective feels defined by growing up ping-ponging between different loyalties. (This will certainly do a number on one’s sense of self.)
However, that Fatherland can be so intricately mapped onto the personal life of its creator, it is not a virtue in itself, although it may unlock some of its meaning. The film’s emotional power — while delayed by design as Zischler peels back Thomas’ layers with Erika’s help — is determined by its aesthetic approach, which sees Pawlikowski and ace cinematographer Łukasz Żal creating limited but attractive 4:3 frames that constantly isolate the Manns from the people and ideas around them. Only a handful of restless allies are allowed to fully enter their orbit.
Holding onto one’s beliefs can be a lonely road, especially when balancing self-preservation. This road is made even more winding by unspoken blockages between generations, but these quiet cracks are not just metaphors for the wider world. Rather, they are a central aspect of political life, serving as a bridge between different eras and political eras. Fatherland it may find insight through limitation, but its static frames contain the weight and movement of history, making it feel, at its strongest, monumental and poetic.
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