“Has enough subtext beyond its small drama to be seen as an important work of art”

Some films have emotional resonance that they don’t elicit from narrative incident but from the inherent humanity in the characters. Pawel Palikowksi’s Fatherland is such a film. Its story about grief and guilt in post-war Germany draws its power from the opposite reaction the two main characters have to a terrible loss, and focuses more on these two and their way to handle the loss than on a specific story arc. But because Pawlikowski is such a precise and measured director, Fatherland packs a punch just from this personal drama alone. What the film adds in all its subtlety is a message for our times, in which fascism is on the rise again; a message that shows that we should be past the point of naïvely thinking that there is still a way to mend the rifts in our society and we can still put trust in the goodness of people. Men should not shape society, on of the film’s central characters says, but society should shape men. With its period setting four years after the second World War, it’s almost incredulous that an intellectual would think that, but it is also Pawlikowski’s warning about the men that are currently trying to shape society in a mold that fits them best. A character study of a father and daughter working through their grief, Fatherland thus has enough subtext beyond its small drama to be seen as an important work of art.

It’s 1949, and famous German novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zichsler), the greatest German writer of his generation (Death in Venice should ring a bell), is being fêted in his native country, even though that country has been split in two. At a press conference a journalist asks him how it feels to be home, which makes him ponder what his home really is. Having fled Germany in 1933 as the Nazis took power, it has been well over a decade since he set foot in the country. He is still not completely safe, with death threats being taken very seriously by the CIA agent that keeps an eye on him and Mann’s assistent, his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller). She too is back on German soil and has some scores of her own to settle. With her first husband, an actor who counted Hermann Göring among his fans, and with the whole German upper class, to be fair. What were these people doing five years ago, she muses to an American journalist she befriended during the war, when she worked as a war reporter.

Then father and daughter get the terrible news that their son and brother Klaus has taken his own life in Cannes (oh, irony). Erika had already, fruitlessly, been trying to contact him, and now her worst fears have come true. Surely they would head to the south of France for the funeral, she suggests, but her father wants to hear nothing of it; his other son Michael can handle things, as he happens to be in the area already. Mann is determined to go to Soviet-occupied Weimar for a lecture about Goethe. Erika can’t belief her ears, but even an emotional outburst can’t move her father one inch. And so they go, only for Mann to be turned into a puppet for Soviet propaganda. In one of the few truly gripping scenes Mann and Erika are approached by a man who says that the nearby former Buchenwald concentration camp is now used by the Soviets to hold and brutally torture dissidents. He pleads Mann to work this awful truth into his speech, and then is removed from the scene in a violent but decisive manner. This moment, and a tour of the room where Goethe died visibly does something to Mann, and slowly he lets the grief over his dead son in, resulting into a restrained but emotional final scene where father and daughter finally find consolation in each other.

Pawlikowski smartly opens Fatherland with a lengthy scene of Klaus Mann having a conversation with his sister over the phone. Portrayed by August Diehl with sensitivity and a touch of melancholy, the scene gives Erika’s grief an emotional anchor. Hüller’s performance of a woman who has not only trouble handling the death of a beloved brother, but also her stoic and ego-centric father, is heartbreaking in the moments where Erika has to either fight the tears in public or let them flow in private. As so often, Hüller does a lot with very little. Erika’s emotions, ranging from a deeply felt sadness to annoyance and furious anger, are contained in Hüller’s eyes, and Germany’s greatest actress since Hanna Schygulla adds yet another great performance to her already impressive resumé; no singing this time though, that is left to the star of Pawlikowski’s previous film Cold War, Joanna Kulig, in a cameo-like appearance as the singer in a jazz band. Zichsler matches Hüller beat for beat, his somewhat arrogant and pompous Thomas Mann a character that is hard to grasp until the film’s final scene.

As in his previous works Ida and Cold War, both set in a changed world after the war, Pawlikowski handles everything with precision. The man is obviously a master in mise-en-scene, and his compositional work is nothing short of brilliant, especially in the crisp imagery created by his regular cinematographer . Some might find Fatherland a bit too cold, even more so than the other two in his post-war trilogy, but he ends on a warm and touching note, so that after a 70-somewhat minutes you leave the theater on an emotional high, and for those who want a bit more out of a film than human drama the alarm that Pawlikowsi sounds rings loud.