Critic's Notebook

Agata Grzybowska

Paweł Pawlikowski has made a career of the stateless: people shaken loose by war who never find a sense of home in the place that takes them in. He returns to that territory in “Fatherland,” and to the stark monochrome that has become his signature, as recognizable as a thumbprint. The film is loosely inspired by an episode from the life of Thomas Mann – played here by Hanns Zischler – the Nobel Prize-winning author who fled Nazi Germany for Switzerland and then, as the war closed in, for the United States. In exile, Mann was famously said to have declared that where he was, there was Germany. It is a grand sentence, and the film seems to wonder what it costs the people standing next to him. Mr. Pawlikowski zooms in on a single vignette, Mann’s 1949 trip to give a speech in Weimar, then under Soviet occupation. It is a small canvas, but a whole divided country is stretched across it, and a journey that drew suspicion from both sides of the Iron Curtain becomes a test of who owes what to whom.

The film’s real subject arrives before the journey begins. It opens with a telephone call between Mann’s children, Erika (Sandra Hüller) and Klaus (August Diehl). Klaus is sitting in front of a bed where a naked woman sleeps peacefully, and he is coming apart. The image does the work of a monologue. It conveys so eloquently the soulless discontent of a life of indulgence that Klaus barely needs to name his torment, which is being made to choose between the opposing ideals of Stalin and Mickey Mouse. Two empires, two sales pitches, and no room for a man who believes in neither. Klaus has not rejected the world so much as run out of places in it to stand, and the bed behind him, with its sleeping stranger, looks less like pleasure than like anesthesia.

Erika urges him to join her and their father on the trip, but Klaus resists, saying dad hates having him around. She pleads once more, pointing out that this may be Thomas’s last journey. It is the kind of argument siblings make when the real one is decades old. Klaus is unmoved; he has sworn never to set foot in Germany again. The call ends without a verdict, though one arrives soon enough as Klaus dies of an overdose of sleeping pills. Thomas coldly dismisses his son as an attention-seeking child and spares no time to mourn. Grief, it seems, is another indulgence, and he has no room for those either. He informs Erika that they will depart for Weimar first thing the next morning. The schedule has not been disturbed. The film lets that sink in without comment, which is the right instinct, because the coldness needs no help from the camera.

Beyond the checkpoint, a different world awaits. The color of the film doesn’t change, but the temperature does. The travelers enter a near-empty restaurant where the waitress has to fetch them a menu from another table. A well-drilled children’s choir assembles to welcome the guests. The hosts make a great show of it, as though this were an important state visit, yet their idea of V.I.P. treatment registers as pitiful. The effort is what gives it away. Pageantry staged by people who can’t afford it is the saddest kind, and Mr. Pawlikowski lets the scene run just long enough for us to feel it. Weimar, Goethe’s town, is being asked to play host to its own culture, and it doesn’t quite have all the props. There is a political point folded into the embarrassment: an occupying power that wants to be loved, and is reduced to rehearsing children to do it.

You don’t need me to tell you about Łukasz Żal’s impeccable cinematography; it’s pretty much a given at this point. The surprise would be an ugly frame. But beauty is where “Fatherland” comes to rest, and the question is whether it should. The film is slight next to “Cold War,” Mr. Pawlikowski’s previous film, which operated within the same parameters. “Cold War” was precise about how the demand for assimilation forces musicians to compromise their art, their integrity and, ultimately, themselves. Every concession there had a cost you could hear, in the songs themselves as they were bent toward whoever was listening. That idea, expounded to devastating effect, is here mentioned only as a footnote, through Klaus’s thread. It is the film’s most urgent question, and it is asked and then abandoned, like a guest who leaves before the ritual toast. Klaus is the character who pays for the dilemma in full, and he is gone before the second act begins. What follows is a film about a father’s reception, when the story that mattered was his son’s refusal.

What remains is a portrait of a man so stubborn about his ideals that he feels nothing at the loss of his son, and the film’s sympathies drift, and ours with them, toward the sacrifices of his children. Thomas carries his fatherland with him into exile. It is Erika and Klaus who get handed the bill.