I can’t think of another filmmaker working today who relishes black-and-white photography the way Paweł Pawlikowski does. His new film Fatherland, like Cold War and Ida, is shot in a lustrous monochrome that turns shadows into punctuation marks and sunbeams into something holy, and that makes its performers, chief among them an incredible Sandra Hüller, look lit from within. (The cinematographer is Łukasz Żal, who shot Hamnet and The Zone of Interest.) The Polish writer-director has spent the last decade-plus rendering the period after WWII in severe black-and-white. Fatherland, which just premiered in competition at Cannes, takes place in 1949 on a trek across a Germany so shattered by the war that it has been divided in two. The travelers are the famous novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Hüller), who is serving on this trip as her father’s assistant, driver, editor, and barber. Thomas fled Germany in 1933 and never lived there again; his citizenship was revoked by the Nazis three years later. But he’s agreed to travel back to his now-recalcitrant home country to be awarded the Goethe Prize. Or, rather, two of them. He’ll first go to Frankfurt, where Goethe was born, to be awarded one version by the West German government, and then cross the border to Weimar, where Goethe died, to receive another by the East Germans.
There are a hundred angles a filmmaker could take on Mann’s life, or, for that matter, on Erika’s — an actor, war correspondent, and outspoken writer who was in a lavender marriage with the poet W. H. Auden. But the window that Pawlikowski chooses for Fatherland is defiantly compact, a stretch of time that the director compresses even more to place the suicide of Erika’s brother Klaus, which happened in the south of France two months before, within the space of the trip. Pawlikowski has never been prone to go long, but at just 82 minutes, Fatherland is as bracing and brief as a polar-bear plunge. The contrast between the narrowness of its scope and the immensity of the history it unfolds against isn’t an accident. It’s a riveting choice, representing the surreality of the attempts to move forward that we witness throughout the trip. The world cracked open, and now everyone’s striving to fit the jagged pieces back into a box called civilized society. In the East, that means obliterating the recent past and starting anew in pursuit of communist utopian dreams under the already alarmingly heavy hand of the Russians. In that West, it means pretending to have never cared for, much less been aligned with or had anything to do with, the Nazis, gliding forward on an oil slick of denial with the CIA guiding the way.
At the gala in Frankfurt, Thomas is approached by two sleekly attired young men who turn out to be Richard Wagner’s grandsons, who would like his help restoring their grandfather’s reputation and the Bayreuth opera house after the inconvenient matter of Hitler becoming the composer’s most famous fan. (“Your mother should be put on trial and the opera should be razed,” he informs them.) Erika, meanwhile, has a run-in with her ex-husband, the actor Gustaf Gründgens (Joachim Meyerhoff), who insists that Hermann Göring sought him out, not the other way around, and that, unlike Erika, he didn’t have the privilege of not playing along because he needed to keep working. (She slaps him.) In Weimar, choirs of children sing a newly composed anthem while a glad-handing Red Army colonel wants to talk about Mephistophelean dialectics, and a man who comes to Thomas’s hotel room to tell him about Buchenwald’s transformation into a political prison abruptly gets dragged off into the night. Thomas, played by Zischler as someone who’s retreated into a stuffed-shirt high-mindedness, has no intention of allowing himself to be used as a figurehead by either side. Or, for that matter, speaking any less abstractly in his speeches about Goethe, grand ideas, and the dream of a Good Germany.
But Erika isn’t safeguarding some literary legacy that she hopes will be bigger than its historical context, and Erika is unable to play along so readily. In real life, it was Mann’s wife Katia, not Erika, who accompanied him on the 1949 trip, but the substitution that the movie makes is rewarding. While Thomas had an immensely fraught relationship with Klaus, whose funeral he plans to attend only after he accepts the second award, Erika and Klaus were close — the film actually opens with a conversation between the siblings in which Klaus, played by August Diehl, tells her, “I don’t believe in anything anymore.” Despair and rage run so much closer to the surface for her; at one point, she heckles drunken men on a Frankfurt street as “fascist scum,” and their shocked affront is worse to her than their unrepentant celebrations. Hüller is having a hell of a year, winning the Silver Bear for her role as a woman passing herself off as a male soldier to claim an estate in Rose, and playing the wry, sadly pragmatic head of the international task force in Project Hail Mary, one of the biggest hits of the year. But in Fatherland, it’s as though she alone were carrying the memories of the past decade and a half, years that so many others seem to have eagerly shucked off. She gives the kind of quietly grand performance you never forget, the kind that perfectly matches this quietly grand movie.
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