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In Paweł Pawlikowski’s ‘Fatherland,’ Thomas Mann’s Divided Germany Is a Study of Artistic Compromise and Family Rupture

The ‘Cold War’ director’s latest explores the political and personal fissures between a famous father and his children.

Part period piece, part political premonition, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland rounds out the Polish director’s loose trilogy set in the detritus of World War II. Following fellow black-and-white dramas Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), the filmmaker’s latest—which won him the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, tied with La Bola Negra—is simple on the surface, and unfolds with an often academic frankness. However, it disguises, within its scant 82-minute runtime, greater ruminations about the state of the world.

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Set in 1949, the story follows a pair of state visits by famed German novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) on either side of the Inner German Border, a few years before the erection of the Berlin Wall. However, amid a personal tragedy, his tense relationships with his children, and the looming specter of authoritarianism, Thomas’s long-awaited return from American exile becomes complicated, in a tale that examines the nature of freedom and artistic and personal repression.

The movie belongs to a remarkable trio of performers, between Zischler’s staunch reserve as the Nobel laureate—who tries to keep a lid on his most passionate political opinions, until he can no longer contain them—and the actors playing his renowned adult children. Sandra Hüller (this year’s Best Actress winner at Berlin) plays his daughter, chaperone and translator Erika, a shadow of her father, who similarly revisits a........

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