The final chapter of Pawlikowski’s postwar trilogy is so much better than its predecessors that it almost retroactively justifies them. ★★★★☆
Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland arrived at the Cannes Competition as the closing chapter of an unofficial trilogy (following Ida and Cold War) and left with the Best Director prize, shared with another film in a competition year when the jury split several awards, including both acting prizes. On the evidence of the film itself, the jury got half of it right. In a competition bloated with films that seemed to conflate length with ambition, Fatherland makes its case in 82 minutes and has the discipline to stop there. Other directors at this year’s festival would have done well to take notes.
The film follows Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) on a road trip through Germany in 1949, from US-occupied Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar: a journey that is part reunion, part reckoning, and part farewell to a country that has destroyed itself and is now being carved up by others. Pawlikowski, who co-wrote the screenplay with Hendrik Handloegten, resists the temptation to turn this into a thesis. The political geography is present, the weight of recent history is everywhere, but the film stays close to its two characters and trusts the landscape to do the rest.
Zischler is quietly commanding as Mann: elderly, somewhat remote, a man who has spent so long being a symbol that he has half forgotten how to be a person. Hüller was a mild surprise. One associates her with a certain bruising, kinetic presence (think Anatomy of a Fall, think Rose), but here she reins that in entirely, giving Erika a crackling, restless intelligence expressed through glances and silences rather than confrontation. It is a more interior performance than one might expect, and it is all the more effective for it. Their dynamic, affectionate, slightly combative, complicated by things left unsaid, is one of the film’s real subjects, and Pawlikowski is wise enough to let it breathe without over-explaining it.
What comes as a genuine surprise, for anyone who found Ida and Cold War occasionally too pleased with their own formal austerity, is how non-academic Fatherland feels by comparison. Łukasz Żal’s black-and-white cinematography is, if anything, more beautiful here: less composed-for-the-frame-grab, more alive to the textures of a ruined country, crumbling facades, empty roads, the particular quality of postwar European light. The images have atmosphere rather than just elegance, which is a meaningful distinction. Where Ida sometimes felt like a film about its own visual prominence, Fatherland feels like a film about Germany, and about fathers and daughters, and about what it means to go home when home no longer exists.
Where is the Fatherland?
During the press conference for the dreaded The Zone of Interest, Żal, jokingly said that he felt like a “multi-camera system supervisor. There are no such issues here, and it is the cinematographer’s most impressive work so far. The cinematic references that surface feel earned rather than decorative. There is something of Jean-Marie Straub in the film’s rigorous attention to space: The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) came to mind more than once, that same quality of letting physical surroundings carry a weight that dialogue alone never quite states.
In one particular scene, the ghost of Alain Resnais flickers through unmistakably, an image of memory and erasure that those familiar with Resnais’s work will recognise immediately, and that should work just as well for those who don’t. The brevity is not incidental. Pawlikowski, at his best, is a director who understands that restraint is a form of respect: for the audience, for the material, for the emotions he is working with. At 82 minutes, Fatherland doesn’t outstay its welcome or strain for significance it hasn’t earned. It arrives, it does what it needs to do, and it ends perfectly. In a competition year that will be remembered partly for its bloated runtimes, that is no small achievement.
For a publication whose default posture toward festival cinema tends toward the sceptical, it is a genuine pleasure to report that Fatherland gave me nothing to disapprove of. It is precise, moving, beautifully made, and perhaps most importantly, this year, the right length, easily among the three best films in the competition, and the kind of film that reminds you why the Cannes Competition, at its best, still matters, somehow.
