New York Film Festival Review: ‘Fatherland’ Finds Redemption and Ruin in Post-War Germany

Cinema has rarely depicted Germany well in the dark years immediately following World War II. The vibe was horror, despair and shame — not the kind of entertainment that most people want to pay for. Who wants to peer into a bombed-out, humiliated nation, populated by losers and fascists? Even more unusual is a film that spotlights a proud, German patriot of the 1940s so sympathetically that he elicits tears from the audience.That’s what Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski has achieved in “Fatherland,” a moving historical drama that jointly won him the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Set in 1949, and inspired by an episode in Colm Tóibín’s novel, “The Magician,” the plot loosely follows the real-life journey of the German novelist Thomas Mann to collect the Goethe Prize of the City of Frankfurt, and then to carry the same speech east into Soviet-controlled Weimar. Tormented by Germany’s post-war split personality — his son Klaus’s bitter “Stalin or Mickey Mouse?” — and by a sudden personal loss, Mann is played with a hauntingly tragic stiff upper lip by Hanns Zischler. He becomes an invigorating portal for understanding those German survivors who had to rebuild their lives and homeland.What is home, and where is it anyway? That question resonates deeply with anyone, like myself, who has lived most of life away from their birthplace. Mann, who was born in Lübeck, Germany, lived in America from 1939 to 1952, mostly in Los Angeles, where he wrote “Doctor Faustus,” the story of a German composer who buys 24 years of genius for the price of his soul — a parable of a country damning itself, written while his motherland burned.The quest for home is also Mr. Pawlikowski’s. “I had to leave my country when I was young,” he has said. “And then thirteen years ago I went back to live in Poland, which is of course very different from the Poland I left many decades ago. So, the feelings of homelessness which Mann and his children experience in our film and their search for a ‘Heimat’ feels familiar.”This is Mr. Pawlikowski’s seventh feature film, and he has established himself as one of the art form’s most distinctive visionaries. As he did with his two previous fiction features, “Ida” (2013) and “Cold War” (2018), he and his beloved cinematographer Łukasz Żal shoot in a severe black-and-white, using a boxy 1.37:1 Academy ratio which gives the action the look of a 1940s newsreel, on steroids.The monochrome photography, and the original perspective on World War II, make “Fatherland” feel like a sequel to Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning “The Zone of Interest” (2023), which was also produced by Ewa Puszczyńska’s Warsaw company Extreme Emotions. That film portrayed the banal family life of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz. Living next door but out of sight of the concentration camp, Höss’s wife Hedwig was played by Sandra Hüller, who now appears as Mr. Mann’s daughter, Erika — a strange double-act as conspirator and conscience for the same catastrophe, three years apart.‘Fatherland’ poster. Via Sebastian DoggartMs. Hüller is on a roll. Building on her breakout, Oscar-nominated role in “Anatomy of a Fall” (2023), she won a Silver Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival for her leading role in “Rose,” and landed parts in “Project Hail Mary” and alongside Tom Cruise in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger.” She encapsulates the “less-is-more” rule of film acting, while still embodying a pressure-cooker of deftly concealed emotions. Her ever-evolving gaze detonates “Fatherland” with fury, grief and sorrow.Music underscores the excellent performances with austerity and depth. The spine of the score is Bach, who lived in Weimar more than 150 years before there was a country by the name of Germany. Transcending history and the nation’s disgrace, Bach’s Cantata No. 147, better known as “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” both opens and closes the film, and acts as a breathtaking gateway to God and redemption. Brief passages of Messiaen evoke the near-impossible task of setting to music a story shaped by the Holocaust. Period music combines pop and jazz — including a delightful singing performance by Joanna Kulig, who starred as Zula in “Cold War.” Radio stations differ on each side of the German border: Soviet army choirs in Weimar and American swing in the west — each equally unpalatable to the Mann family.It’s a minor miracle this picture was ever made. It cost a reported $11.4 million, a huge sum for an arthouse German-language film in today’s depressed market, and more than double the $4.9 million budget for “Cold War.” That money came from a combination of European state funds, the largest of them the Polish Film Institute, and the streaming service Mubi. It was shot over 38 days, almost all in Poland doubling for ruined Germany, with some location work in Weimar itself at Goethe’s Gartenhaus and the National Theatre. Mr. Pawlikowski rewarded his fatherland with hundreds of jobs for cast and crew, and with the fifth most expensive film ever made in Poland.The director makes no secret of why 1949 interested him. “The old paradigm is dead, the old rules no longer apply, and in their place emerge two crude, mutually exclusive narratives,” he said of Mann’s Germany. “Narratives which flatten everything, suck oxygen out of the air, corner you into taking sides, and slowly make it impossible to see straight and speak freely.” Mann’s only defence, he adds, was art — “the open eye for the complexities and paradoxes of life.”Mr. Pawlikowski and his collaborators have honored Mr. Mann’s message by creating a quietly devastating work of art, concisely unfolding in 82 minutes, which resonates with our own deeply polarized society, and exposes, without ever preaching, the long-term anguish caused by fascism and authoritarian demagoguery.

New York Film Festival Review: ‘Fatherland’ Finds Redemption and Ruin in Post-War Germany

New York Film Festival Review: ‘Fatherland’ Finds Redemption and Ruin in Post-War Germany

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