Fatherland
In Paweł Pawlikowski’s third post-WWII meditation, exiled author Thomas Mann tours a devastated Germany whose divisions echo his own fractured family.
In 1949, ageing German Nobel laureate Thomas Mann breaks his long exile from his homeland to honour Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 200th anniversary in the latter’s birthplace of Frankfurt, West Germany. Next, he plans to visit the city where the literary giant died: Weimar, now in the communist East. Chauffeured by his resentful actor/writer daughter Erika, Thomas crosses a country he barely recognises, even as he waxes poetic about its heritage. Meanwhile, Erika notices in person – as her beloved, tormented brother Klaus does in his fiction – how two divergent but equally compromised regimes are being installed atop the still-festering wounds of Nazism. The country they grew up in is a fading memory; but can this intellectual family even feel at home with one another?
Paweł Pawlikowski’s drama is the third in a thematic triptych of European postwar reverberations – filmed, like its predecessors Ida and Cold War (MIFF 2018), in luminous black-and-white. Pawlikowski’s immaculate road trip through Germany’s cultural crossroads follows a crisp yet elliptical map of details: disgusted looks at parties; silences in half-empty restaurants; dryly ironic new uses for old infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Manns’ repressed tensions emerge gradually in masterful lead performances by Hanns Zischler (Kings of the Road, MIFF 1976) and Sandra Hüller (Rose, MIFF 2026; Anatomy of a Fall, MIFF 2023), whose brilliantly understated turn as Erika captures a breadth of emotions lurking just below the surface.
“Five stars … Here is an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ personal and historical pain.” – The Guardian
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