The opening shot in Paweł Pawlikowski’s historical drama, “Fatherland,” starting at the M.V. Film Center on Nov. 13, is arresting. A naked man sitting on the floor, smoking a cigarette, speaks desolately into the phone while leaning up against a rumpled bed — a naked woman lying with her back toward us. His words are mystifying, starting as he does mid-sentence: “… and then I see her hands, small and white, folded in her lap like those of a saint. And when she looks at me, she has this puffy, red face with small, evil eyes. The hands of a Madonna and the face of a butcher.”
The sad, young man is Klaus Mann (played with world-weary pathos by August Diehl), quoting the striking, grotesque imagery from his masterwork, “Mephisto.” The voice on the other end of the phone is his beloved sister Erika, urging him to join her and their father, Thomas Mann (subduedly played by Hanns Zischler), on a trip back to their homeland. Klaus exhales, “I swore I’d never set foot in Germany again. A horrible country with horrible people. And a language that was created to lie in. And Father is a master at it.”
Klaus beleagueredly agrees to join them on this journey in 1949, when the Nobel laureate travels first to U.S.-dominated Frankfurt and then to Soviet-controlled Weimar to accept the Goethe Prize. During the height of the Cold War, the tensions around Thomas’ return to his “fatherland” become clear at a testy press conference in Frankfurt. Thomas has lived in the U.S. for 16 years, and the correspondents snipe at him about his allegiances in different languages, which Erika (performed with immense nuance by Sandra Hüller) diplomatically translates. Thomas continually retreats to his position as an artist as a defense, saying at one point, “I am an American citizen, that is true. But I’m a German writer as well. I live in California, but where home is a much harder question.”
In a divided Germany, everyone wants something different from Thomas, who struggles to stay above the political divisions in his homeland — and the deep, painful fractures within his own family, portrayed with great nuance between him and Erika.
Lukasz Zal’s moody black-and-white photography of a war-weary Germany, shot in silvery monochrome, plays a pivotal role in “Fatherland,” imbuing it with a restrained, atmospheric precision. It goes far beyond merely marking the story as a period piece. The highlights, shadows, and gray hues in between create an emotional moodiness that underscores the quiet intensity of a film that explores identity, guilt, family fracture, and a divided post-war Europe.
“Fatherland” plays at the M.V. Film Center starting on Friday, Nov. 13. For tickets and more information, visit mvfilmsociety.com.
