Writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski’s Palme D’or winning FATHERLAND is a masterpiece. It says more in 75 minutes about love, morality and humanity than most films say in two hours, and many directors say in an entire career.
Pawlikowski re-imagines Nobel-prize winning author Thomas Mann's post-war return to Germany with his wife as a trip with his daughter Erika instead. He had fled to the USA in 1933 to avoid Nazi prosecution and this is his first trip back to his Heimat or homeland. Journalists, politicians, and ordinary Germans all want to know if his loyalty is to the capitalist USA or to Communist Russia, as this division is now being played out in the emerging zones of West and East Germany. And is he an American or Germany now? Where is home versus homeland.
The political story is told through the lens of music, just as Pawlikowski did in COLD WAR. Erika is horrified at the free-spirited joyous dancing to a jazz band in Frankfurt, by people who years earlier would have been happily enabling the Nazi regime. Various choirs are brought out to regale the famous Thomas Mann - and perhaps win him to their cause - whether children singing of a new socialist future in Weimar or soldiers singing Russian folk songs. It is significant that the only spontaneous moment of music is the final one - when the Manns come across the church where Bach was capellmeister and hear an organist play. This is the sincere and true moment of emotional catharsis.
That catharsis is prompted by the apparent suicide of Klaus Mann. We see him in the prologue in Cannes with his lover, on the phone to Erika, complaining of his persecution under the Nazis and his existential crisis now that all must be forgotten and a new Germany forged. He argues for artists to refuse to play the game, and to commit suicide. When he reels off the list of those who have already done so, it is chilling. His ghost haunts the balance of the film.
But his father Thomas is with Goethe. He argues not for an "inner emigration" or a nihilistic suicide but for life and love and the complexity of humanity, and for society not to be hidebound by ideology but to embrace that complexity. Even when he's verbally slapping down the Wagner grandkids, he does so with a twinkle in his eye. As played by German legend Hans Zischler, he is vital.
His daughter Erika, as played by Sandra Hueller, the finest actress of her generation, is brave, pragmatic but deeply felt. The portrait of intimacy between father and daughter, and daughter and brother, is heartfelt and beautiful. But also lightly done and never manipulative.
The final scene of intimate grief and soul-enriching music me cry. The whole film is a tour-de-force of post-war cinematic language as well as how music both enriches and is exploited. It is a film that tells us everything about what it means to be part of society and to preserve one's humanity and embrace art, while never shying away from the difficulties of doing so. Poor Klaus could not.
FATHERLAND is rated 12A and has a running time of 1hr 22m. Pawel Pawlikowski won Best Director at Cannes. It goes on release in the UK and USA on October 23rd.
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