Fatherland

Chronicle of a film that went wrong. In terms of its era. In terms of its approach. In terms of the critics’ enthusiastic acclaim: these all contributed to the Best Director award that Polish director Pavel Pawlikowski took home from Cannes, with full honours. It wasn’t his first, but his other films – the titles are needed to jog the memory: the perfect "Ida" and the already confusing "Cold War" – as well as their marvellous black-and-white cinematography, had plots, characters and drama. Here, there is the character: Thomas Mann, returning to Germany after his exile in the United States. There would also be the drama: the suicide of his son Klaus, in a hotel room in Cannes. But the plot remained in the mind of the director – who also wrote the screenplay – who had wanted to draw on the biography – fictionalised and acclaimed by critics – of the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, entitled The Magician. Fatherland tells only of the return to Germany of the Nobel Prize-winning Thomas Mann, who in 1933 had left the land of his ancestors to emigrate to the United States. We see him with his daughter Erika in 1949, first in Frankfurt and then in Weimar, on the other side of the Iron Curtain. He speaks of Goethe and is highly honoured on both sides. By the new West Germans and by the Soviets. The intellectual is undecided as to who is celebrating him more – amidst the ruins of Europe. In his Buick, he remains unperturbed by the suicide of his son Klaus. It is being released in cinemas and simultaneously on MUBI.