Fatherland

"Are you familiar with the story of Thomas Mann? I imagine it feels different if you're not German"

This is what a veteran German movie critic told me a few hours after we both had watched Fatherland at the Festival de Cannes, as Paweł Pawlikowski's latest effort was one of the most requested for screeners and one of the favourites to win the Palme d'Or. It's such a biographical, culturally rooted story that I completely agreed and understood what she meant, but at the same time I can't help but recommend it to anyone into good cinema, regardless of their nationality.

Thomas Mann was "the highest authority in German letters", as literally described in the film, but this short story about his return to his homeland circa 1949 deals with both the philosophical/political figure and the family man. As the two sides get gradually depicted, Hanns Zischler shines through and through in the main role. An acid, bored, unexpected, foreseeing face for the author. A distant, tricky, wounded soul for the father. Both seemingly ice-cold.

The movie paints an incredibly stark contrast from the get-go, as August Diehl's Klaus Mann greets us with a memorable phone-call monologue full of art and warmer reflections only to immediately give the baton to his father and his sister, who take the spotlight until the end. Probably an ingenious idea by Pawlikowski to make us as spectators actually miss Klaus for the duration of the film, it works but also bewilders to some extent.

But to me the one carrying much of the film on her shoulders is Sandra Hüller and her Erika Mann, as Thomas's daughter wonderfully acts as the writer's right hand, but also as his emotional trigger, as the representative of what's left of the family's soul.

I don't want to spoil the publicly documented family plot, or the specific events during Thomas Mann's visit to this conflicting, tense post-war Germany, but suffice to say it's a fascinating, old-fashioned way to travel back in time with the protagonists as if you were seeing history being made in the past times through a little window.

The deliberate choice of black and white, a 4:3 aspect ratio, and the many fixed long shots (while movement is conveniently reserved for vehicles) allows Pawlikowski to frame actors differently and contrary to current trends, and some of his shots, such as the one with the car meandering among the trees, stay burned into your retina, just like that old family photo hanging on your grandmother's wall. In-between the homage and the classy storytelling, his masterful visual narrative elevates the cast's performance and will undoubtedly leave a mark.

But, "are words just background music?" No, they aren't. Although Mann is coming back to his land with some previous views shattered (some of them laid during The Great War), there's room for reflection and to understand why the writer's concept of the titular "fatherland" was ahead of his time and only possible after living through different wars, sides, positions, ages, and exile. This is after all a co-production between Poland, Germany, France, and Italy, and the film is able to convey the different tensions within and outside the German borders, including political manipulation, pressure on intellectuals, Nazi nostalgia, and the opposing sides of the growing Cold War from the East and the West.

I finally liked the few bits of very personal humour used here, as a genuine nod to how the Manns would have behaved in their time, I want to believe. And of course the inevitable references to the romanticism with which Germans have historically dealt with death. But it isn't some dense philosophical treatise. It's a direct, serious, well-paced story that stays inherently human until the final surrender.

When you leave the room after the mere 80-minute runtime, it is as if not much had happened, but at the same time as if you had been transported to another time and visual language, all to get a privileged spot to fathom a grander scale. I might not have been acquainted with the multifaceted story of Thomas Mann, but Fatherland surely made me feel close to it as an observer, and it did so with a piece of beautiful classical cinema.

"Shouldn't we drop everything and go to Cannes?"