Director: Paweł Pawlikowski
Stars: Sandra Hüller, Hanns Zischler, August Diehl
Germany, 1949. Nobel Prize winning writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) returns to his homeland after 16 years in the US, having absconded to evade the rise of fascism and the devastation that followed. The purpose of his visit is to accept a pair of awards; one in US-controlled Frankfurt in the West, the other in communist Weimar to the East. With him is his assistant and daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), who is distracted by the absence of her brother Klaus (August Diehl), seen in a dawdling prologue at a villa in Cannes, surrounded by drug paraphernalia and vocally ambivalent about joining the junket.
Fatherland comes eight years after the last chapter in Paweł Pawlikowski’s monochrome series on life in post-war Europe and its lost souls seeking reinvention. What started in 2013’s Ida as a spiritually keen and evocative detour for the director has calcified over the years into something rigid and lifeless. Though much loved generally, 2018’s Cold War lacked something and settled, in my mind at least, into the mold of a certain kind of European art house cinema. Too precious and, ultimately, stiflingly tasteful. The cinematic equivalent of a coffee table book, or the music of Dido. Fatherland is much worse. The stark black and white photograph of Łukasz Żal – once intrigued by form and framing – lacks the gravitas it once strove ambitiously to elicit. While the time period is impressively rendered in the choice locations and production design, it feels shot with perfunctory disinterest. A feeling that spills out into this willfully obtuse theft of time.
Long at 82 minutes, Fatherland is a closed book that barely opens. Dry and terminally subdued, it assumes an academic level of knowledge and interest in its subject and then acts cagy about revealing much of anything. A reporter in Frankfurt presses the supposedly fundamental question of the film, “Where is home?”. The question is never answered, no the lack of an answer addressed with much keenness. Both Mann and Erika maintain stiff, diffident exteriors. He, an aging intellectual, seems wholly disengaged from his emotions. Erika is slightly more prone to showing her frustration and temper, but is mostly buttoned down, reserved because of her closeted queerness, stuck in a kind of stalemate with her father in which self expression is considered gauche. And so we trundle around with them joylessly from place to place, with little said and little to glean.
The unspoken punches through a couple of times. After Mann has accepted the first of these commendations, Erika steps back into the empty auditorium where we feel the sense of the missing in the negative space – a subtly rendered recognition of the holocaust. There’s also a nominal preoccupation with the philosophical and political qualities of classical composers, through which the theme of being tainted by association is danced around. Hitler’s love of Wagner colouring the music. We’re given a taste of divided post-war Germany, struggling to reconcile with itself.
But for the most part what unfolds is a piss-takingly tedious chore, potted with conversations that inevitably return to the subject of Goethe. Fatherland all but refuses to step out of this prison of academic rhetoric. We can appreciate that these characters are by turns reticent and embittered, but the experience of being with them is tremendously dull, caged in a level of minutiae that requires specialist knowledge to appreciate, rendering the film incredibly niche and miserly. There’s no impetus and next to no emotion. When, eventually, we follow a car meandering the countryside for what feels like an eternity, the scene comes to feel damningly like a reflection of the film at large. A road to nowhere. That we never reach a destination – Mann and Erika make a pit-stop and the movie abruptly finishes – gives credence to this read, and acts like a dark joke on the audience. 82 minutes thoroughly wasted.
It’s rare that a film makes me angry, but Fatherland‘s lack of generosity to the viewer pissed me off. If it’s evocative, it’s evocative of boredom, of feeling hemmed in and unable to say your piece. The timely reflections on fascism and genocide are too gravely tentative, making the film feel timid in the current climate, in which the need for rebellion and refusal feel evermore urgent. In the end it doesn’t even feel stiflingly tasteful. It’s a musty bore, telling an anecdote and trying to hide that the ending’s been forgotten. The worst kind of pretentious art house bullshit.
