Sandra Hüller cements her status as one of the leading on screen presences in contemporary cinema in Paweł Pawlikowski’s FATHERLAND.
Hüller portrays Thomas Mann’s daughter, Erika, actress, writer, rally driver. In the summer of 1949, at the height of the Cold War, father and daughter embark on a challenging and emotional road trip in a black Buick taking them across a Germany in ruins, from US dominated Frankfurt to Soviet controlled Weimar.
Returning home after sixteen years of exile in the US, Thomas Mann has to face not only a divided fatherland, but also a deep fracture within his own family, specifically his suicidal son, Klaus.
Both German states, East and West, claim Mann as their own, a kind of cultural war brinkmanship within the Cold War. There’s a fair bit of culture washing on both sides, with Wagner apologists and theatre makers defending their roles in Nazi propaganda. A highlight of the film is a fiery confrontation between Erika and an actor who made a Mephistophelian deal with Goebbels.
Co written with Henk Handloegten, Pawlikowski presents FATHERLAND in a very distilled way, unfolding in graphic images and concentrated scenes, leaving the audience space to feel and imagine and interpret. A pictorial palimpsest perhaps of the actual event.
The success of such an approach is sealed by Łukasz Żal, two-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer for IDA, and COLD WAR on which he collaborated with Paweł Pawlikowski. His exquisite black and white cinematography sets a visceral visual tone to the film.
These gifted film makers show a particular preference to what Thomas Mann called the “finer and much less obvious rhythmical laws” of storytelling.
The relationships between father and daughter, father and son, sister and brother, are encapsulated in an intrinsic miniature. FATHERLAND stands for the macro sense of exile from geographical homeland but also the micro emotional landscape of the father and his relationship to his offspring, the emotional exile of estrangement.
The siblings, Erika and Klaus, are obliquely symbolic of the division of state visited on Germany after World War II.
A masterpiece in miniature, FATHERLAND has faint echoes of the Faustian legend that both father and son developed in their writing.
