The Nobel-prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) go on an unsentimental journey in 1949 through West and East Germany in Pawel Pawlikowski’s damn-near perfect period piece Fatherland.
Told with exacting restraint yet as layered as the lacquer on an ebony Biedermeier console, this forms a loose triptych with Pawlikowski’s last two features, Ida and Cold War, both of which were set at least partly behind the Iron Curtain. As with its predecessors, the characters here go through the ringers of personal crises, with extra rolling pressure applied by the politics of the times. In Fatherland‘s case, Mann finds himself compelled to confront his failings as a parent and also make an invidious choice between the ideologies of “Mickey Mouse or Stalin” when the lofty rhetoric of high art can no longer offer ivory-tower sanctuary.
Fatherland
The Bottom Line
A masterful exploration of family, history and angst.
