Fatherland

If you like your arthouse cinema thematically rich yet concise enough that you’re at the bar discussing it over a glass or two in short order, Pawel Pawlikowski (Ida) has made another of his 80-minute opuses for you. Like a conjurer with a bottomless top hat, the Polish filmmaker packs more into this short-yet-stately monochrome historical drama than others manage in twice the time. 

Brevity, of course, is not a virtue in itself, but when Fatherland reaches its beautiful, pin-drop final scene, your mind will be spinning with ideas of home, grief, art, war guilt, memory, ideological conflict, and family bonds and traumas. Pawlikowski finds common ground with Bergman’s Wild Strawberries in his ageing artist’s road-trip ruminations on a life as full of frustration as fulfilment. 

As with his romance Cold War, initially set in the same year, the Polish filmmaker identifies 1949 as a malleable moment before the post-war European order calcifies. Risking falling through the cracks in this unreliable new East-West divide is Nobel-winning writer Thomas Mann (Kings of the Road’s Hanns Zischler). The great German author of Death in Venice (1912) and The Magic Mountain (1924) is returning home from American exile for the first time since before World War II, his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) in tow as interpreter and chauffeur. Louche, disillusioned son Klaus (A Hidden Life’s August Diehl) is due to join them as they travel to Frankfurt in the American zone and then on to Soviet-controlled Weimar to pay tribute to Mann’s great influence, Goethe. Klaus’s absence hangs over the trip, an unspoken sorrow. 

Colm Tóibín’s 2021 novel The Magician, a fictionalised account of Mann’s life, may have been a loose influence for Pawlikowski and Henk Handloegten’s eloquent screenplay (the Irish novelist gets a ‘thank you’ in the credits). Fatherland narrows the scope to a few days of glad-handing, drinks receptions, speeches, and, across the Iron Curtain, choirs of beaming children singing communist anthems in the writer’s honour. This strange carousel unfolds through Erika’s eyes. She frets about her brother’s whereabouts, making wary small talk with their CIA escort and kissing off a possible lover in the press corps (Anna Madeley). Hüller is majestic again, laconic and jaded, but with bite.

This is another expansive, enriching work from a modern master

Erika’s bisexuality is hinted at, as is her marriage of convenience to WH Auden (the literary connections run deep), but as with her father, it’s her soul not her heart that’s on the line. They have come back to a home that no longer exists. 

One immaculately staged soiree has Richard Wagner’s grandsons petitioning the writer to help rehabilitate the antisemitic composer’s reputation as, across the road, Erika’s ex-husband, a famous Third Reich actor, smugly shrugs off his friendship with Göring. In this new post-war order, the Nazis have merely changed clothes. Across the border, a genial apparatchik (All Quiet on the Western Front’s Devid Striesow) tries to recruit Mann as a cultural figurehead for East Germany. Of course, the man who wrote Doctor Faustus understands the deals he’s being asked to make.

These fabulously composed, stately set pieces are framed in claustrophobic Academy aspect ratio by Pawlikowski and his long-time cinematographer Lukasz Zal (The Zone of Interest, Hamnet). Fatherland is an elegant, engrossing film; chilly at times, but also poignant as repressed feelings finally bubble to the surface. This is another expansive, enriching work from a modern master. 

Fatherland premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.