Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland is rigorously designed austere artistry. The year is 1949 and the film follows the elderly Nobel laureate writer Thomas Mann, played by Hanns Zischler, as he returns to Germany after a 16-year exile - he has been invited to celebrate the 200th birth anniversary of Goethe. He is accompanied by his daughter Erika, played by Sandra Hüller who does it all from helping him prep his speeches to picking out the right tie for him to wear.
At the forefront is the drama of the Mann family – a brother Klaus, played by August Diehl, addicted to drugs, their re-location to the USA, the terrifying efficiency with which Mann greets the news that Klaus has died by suicide, Erika’s own emotional scars. But all of this is framed against the larger drama of a divided Germany, the wounds of war, the melancholic question of where is home?
Pawlikowski builds up the emotion with exquisite precision and Hüller is absolutely magnificent. Watch her in a scene in which Erika speaks with her mother about Klaus. Her voice doesn’t shake but her eyes well up – her grief is so exquisitely controlled that a passerby would barely notice. There is mastery here, in every frame.