Cannes film festival: Hanns Zischler stars as Thomas Mann on his 1949 tour of Germany, contending with political barbs, personal tragedy and his daughter, played by an extraordinary Hüller
H
ere is an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ personal and historical pain. It is directed and co-written by the Polish film-maker Paweł Pawlikowski and shot in lustrous monochrome by Lukasz Zal; it is a film about exile and betrayal, the impossibility of going home and of reconciling an artist’s children to their secondary importance.
The setting is 1949 and the celebrated German novelist and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann – who fled the Nazis before the war for California exile and US citizenship – has returned home, first visiting Frankfurt (now in West Germany) to receive an award named after Goethe, whose birthplace this is. It is Goethe’s enlightened civilised wisdom and apolitical artistry Mann will pointedly evoke in his many elaborate speeches.
Mann, played with withdrawn politeness by Hanns Zischler, is accompanied by his long-suffering grownup daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller); he is received with rapturous acclaim and, given his importance, assigned a CIA liaison. But he disconcerts and embarrasses his hosts by expressing his intention to accept a second award in Weimar, where Goethe actually lived, but which is now in the communist East and perhaps tainted by its association with the chaotic Weimar republic that ushered in the Nazis. Mann greets the communist apparatchiks’ acclaim there with the same diplomatically opaque withdrawal.
