FATHERLAND Review

We have been waiting for Fatherland. Not this specific film exactly, but the feeling of it. The particular gravity of a Pawlikowski picture arriving at Cannes in black and white with Sandra Hüller in it, the sense that something has been made with absolute certainty about what it wants to be and absolute patience in becoming it. After three days and nine films, some of them beautiful and many of them wanting, Fatherland arrived as our tenth film of the festival like a deep breath drawn slowly and released without trembling. We sat very still for all 82 minutes. We did not want it to end.

The film set in 1949 and follows Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning German writer, and his daughter Erika as they make a road trip across a country in ruins. From American-controlled Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar, through rubble and ghost towns and the particular silence of a civilization trying to decide what to do with the face of what it did. Pawlikowski, who made Ida and Cold War with this same unhurried precision, has been circling the wreckage of twentieth-century Europe his entire career. Fatherland feels like an arrival at the very center of it.

Pawlikowski and Lukasz Zal find the precise moment when narrative lands on a face and stays there. Every frame feels like a decision. Not one of them is wasted.

Lukasz Zal, who shot both Ida and Cold War and more recently The Zone of Interest, photographs the ruined Germany of 1949 with an eye that makes devastation look like poetry without ever making it look beautiful in ways that would be dishonest. The shadows fall precisely. The ruins are composed with a care that does not aestheticize suffering but insists on its weight. There is a sequence in which Thomas visits the room where Goethe died, standing in the space where one century's genius surrendered to time, being photographed himself, becoming a relic in the presence of relics. It is one of the finest single scenes we have witnessed at this Cannes.

Hanns Zichler plays Thomas Mann as a man who has described himself as a bourgeois relic and has made his peace with the description. His performance is a precise and quietly thrilling balancing act, a man whose public speeches, what Erika calls his Olympic speeches, are all encompassing statements of post-war ideology, and whose private silences contain something smaller and more bewildered. A dream sequence, Thomas at a funeral that dissolves into a glint in his eye as he lies in bed, is handled with such assurance that we felt the full weight of what keeps this man awake without a single word being spoken.

Sandra Hüller is a once-in-a-generation talent and we will not pretend otherwise. She does things in this film that we do not fully understand and cannot stop thinking about.

Hüller plays Erika Mann, haunted by the absence of her brother Klaus, seeing fragments of him everywhere she goes. The film gives her scenes of extraordinary range, from a moment where she shouts down a group of fascists with a fury that feels entirely uncontained, to a richly deserved slap delivered to her ex-husband during a celebration to her father, to the quieter scenes where she sits beside Thomas in an abandoned building listening to a musician play, grief passing between them like something shared and unspeakable. She finds something different in every register and every one of them is true.

At 82 minutes, Fatherland does not overstay its welcome by a single frame. Pawlikowski has now made three films about the fractures of European identity in the twentieth century, and this one feels like the most personal reckoning of the three. It asks what a country is made of when the story it told about itself has been proven catastrophically false. It asks what a family is made of under the same conditions. It does not answer either question. It sits with both of them, in the rubble, in the dark, with the music playing, and lets them be as large and unanswerable as they are.

We walked out of our third film of day three into the Cannes evening feeling the particular satisfaction of having been in the presence of something that knew exactly what it was. That feeling is rarer than it should be at a film festival. We are grateful for it.

🍿 SCORE = 93/100