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Director Paweł Pawlikowski’s movies are very reserved. They are dialled back and they are subtle and much is left unexplored but they are always satisfying. They are also stunningly artistic, both in terms of their sensibility and their aesthetic. There’s a lot of adjectives I’ve thrown out there but I can see that none of them are particularly joyous. When asked, on returning home, if I’d enjoyed Fatherland, I replied that it had been really interesting. ‘So, no then?’ said my wife. ‘Oh I did,’ I replied ‘it was… interesting.’.

I guess I appreciated it more than I enjoyed it, and is most certainly interesting. I might have been stuck for words but the one I had wasn’t used inappropriately. The problem might be that I adored Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida. That was the first in what is now a trilogy of black and white historical dramas, and it was beautiful and moving. It was still dialled back and reserved and all those other things but much warmer than the two films that have followed. 2018’s Cold War was captivating (there’s another ambiguous descriptor) but the characters were quite frustrating. That isn’t true of this, Sandra Hüller is so compelling (and another), but it didn’t draw me in as much. 

It is though, as I say, very interesting. 

The story presents a fictional story around real life Weimar writer Thomas Mann as he returns to a 1949 Germany having escaped to America during the war. He and his daughter are driving to a ceremony where he is to be honoured. That is not what it is about though, it is about a country trying to find its cultural identity while under peaceful occupation by four different nations and just before the East/West divide. There are lots of films about Germany under Hitler and a number around the Cold War (including Pawlikowski’s last) but this period goes largely unexamined. It is very… well, I’ve said it already. The fact that Pawlikowski is Polish only makes it more so. 

Fatherland won best director at Cannes and I can’t argue with that. This is the work of an artist in total command of his craft and he uses cinema in a way quite unlike anyone else. 

I am definitely glad I saw it.