Paweł Pawlikowski, the Academy Award-winning director of 'Cold War', returns to the screen after eight years with a borderline slow cinema road trip across post-War Germany in the bio-drama 'Fatherland'.
Pawlikowski's film takes a glimpse into the life of Thomas Mann, the real-life German novelist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate known for major works such as 'Death in Venice', 'The Magic Mountain', and 'Doctor Faustus'. Among students of German literature, Mann was considered the heir of Goethe in expressing the German soul.
Born in Lübeck, Germany, Mann eventually fled Nazi Germany in 1933, lived in the United States during World War II, and later returned to Switzerland, where he died in 1955.
SWITCH: 'FATHERLAND' TRAILER
Dramatising the return to Germany of Mann (Hanns Zischler, 'Clouds of Sils Maria', 'Stations of the Cross') and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller, 'Project Hail Mary', 'The Zone of Interest') in 1949, Pawlikowski's black-and-white film depicts the renowned German novelist's homecoming amid the Cold War. It was Mann's first trip to the titular fatherland since Adolf Hitler came to power. In 'Fatherland', he grapples with the fallout of his decision to leave his homeland as he collects two Goethe Prizes: one in Frankfurt and the other in Weimar. Meanwhile, as they travel between the West and the East, Erika is deeply conflicted by her father's apparent silence in the lingering shadow of fascist Germany.
There is a surprising amount of inside baseball that rewards viewers familiar with Mann's life. An example is Erika's encounter with her jerk ex-husband, ex-Nazi sympathiser Gustaf Gründgens, a German actor best-known the roles of Mephistopheles in Peter Gorski's film adaptation of 'Faust' in 1960, and as the Safecracker who is the chief judge of the kangaroo court of criminals in Fritz Lang's 'M'.
Running at a brief 82 minutes, Pawlikowski's direction is minimalist and elegiac. Dialogue is meaningful, the frequently long silences are loaded with implication.
Running at a brief 82 minutes, Pawlikowski's direction is minimalist and elegiac. Dialogue is meaningful, the frequently long silences are loaded with implication and the monochromatic cinematography of Łukasz Żal ('Hamnet', 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things') is painterly – this is Pawlikowski's third black and white period drama shot in 1.37:1 aspect ratio.
The languid pacing and sparse sound design of the opening scene, where Klaus Mann (August Diehl, 'Inglourious Basterds') calls his sister Erika from an apartment in Cannes, depressed, dishevelled and a living embodiment of the torpor of post-WWII Germany, sets the tone for the rest of the film.
A highly emotional story about a pair of intellectuals dreamily navigating once-familiar landscapes irrevocably changed in fascism's wake, 'Fatherland' is a quiet film about a weighty subject, rendered precisely and without an ounce of fat by a modern master of cinema.