As expected, Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Fatherland, which I caught late yesterday afternoon, is an austere masterwork. Damn near perfect in every respect, it immediately struck me as a Palme d’Or winner waiting to happen. Spare and precise and honed to the bone, Fatherland runs only 82 minutes…thrilling discipline!
The performances are equally spare, if not more so. Sandra Huller is being touted (and will continue to be touted) as a Best Actress Oscar contender for the next several months, but she plays it very close to the best, as in “very“. The German actress has one scene in which she lets loose with emotional frustration and unleashed grief over the shocking suicide of her brother Klaus (August Diehl), but that’s it. The rest of her performance is subdued to the max, and yet the reality of her core situation sinks right in.
A 1949 road movie about the great Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Huller) travelling through a divided Germany for a Goethe celebration in the city of Weimar, Fatherland is about as narratively fat-free as a smarthouse feature could possibly be.
Translation: Everything that needs to be said or understood is conveyed by Fatherland as fully as necessary, although some of the rubes will probably complain “there’s not enough meat on the bone!” To which I say “there’s enough meat here, trust me…quality, not quantity…nutrition is all.”
It was principally shot, of course, by Pawlikowski’s longtime collaborator Lukasz Zal with the usual needle-sharp monochrome palette — blacks, grays, silvertones — within a boxy 1.37:1 aspect ratio.
Fatherland is immaculate and exquisite, and is particularly admirable for the subtlety it deploys at every turn. Plot advancements and historical underpinnings are never hammered home — it’s all played deftly and solemnly, and with a fascinating textural touch.
One of my favorite scenes is nominally of little consequence, and yet it’s a perfect brushstroke. Thomas and Erika are stopped — idling — at an East German border crossing. A lowly soldier, presumably unaware of the elder Mann’s status, taps on a rear passenger window and asks by way of a slight gesture if Thomas could spare a cigarette. The author rolls down the window and offers the grunt one of his smallish cigars.
I’m sorry but I liked Fatherland so much that I’m leaving now to catch it a second time at an 8:30 am Grand Lumiere screening.