Pawel Pawlikowski, with this icy draught of a film, completes a remarkable trilogy about Europe after the second World War. Ida, from 2013, and Cold War, from 2018, dealt principally with characters from the director’s native Poland. Fatherland addresses a German cultural giant. Each film is shot in black and white in narrow ratio. Each deals with guilt and compromise.
The new picture joins Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), the peerless German novelist, in 1949 as, with Erika Mann (Sandra Hüller), his polymath daughter, he drives across blasted Europe to be feted first in West and then in East Germany. Long resident in the United States, he is warned that the authorities there will not take kindly to his hobnobbing with communists, but he refuses to tolerate these supposed new realities.
Zischler wears a stony integrity that butts against the smallness of too many compromised individuals in nations defined by their occupiers. But it is the endlessly reliable Hüller who gets to coolly tease away at the unhappy options facing them. Erika’s showdown with her former husband, Gustaf Gründgens, an actor believed to have collaborated with the Nazis, is a masterpiece of cold fury.
A great deal is crammed into a short film during which not much happens, but the key theme is our uncertain understanding of what home means. If such a thing is still definable for the Manns, the war has rendered any return impossible.
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Shot in chiselled light by Lukasz Zal, who was behind the camera for the first two films in the trilogy, Fatherland also becomes, as the car moves eastwards, increasingly taken up with the ravages of grief and the responsibility of the artist. Those themes come together in a beautiful, sad epiphany that closes out a terse film with divine economy.
