Castles Made of Words, with Organ in the Wings

Attention organ music geeks: the film Fatherland, a slow-brewing, low-key sensation, is one of the most organ-heavy major motion pictures in years. Snatches of Olivier Messiaen’s mystic organ music speckle the film’s otherwise spartan soundtrack, and a key finale features Bach’s immortal “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” performed in a partially bombed-out post-war German church. The scene is more than atmospheric decoration, reaching cathartic depths and resolution in the storyline. Bach rules the day.

But this opening paragraph spoils some of the plot and buries the lede. Suffice to say, Fatherland is a haunting, minimalistic, and powerful experience, another feather in the cap of Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski, whose 2018 Cold War (similarly in sumptuous black and white) was one of that year’s most highly praised films (and who spoke at SBIFF that year).

Through Cold War, its predecessor Ida, and now Fatherland, Pawlikowski has shown a creative, playful grasp of history — its details and the complexities of its effects on personal (and sometimes autobiographical) stories. To that end, the seemingly simple title Fatherland carries multiple meanings.

At the center of this fictionalized true story is the thorny subject of legendary novelist Thomas Mann, who fled Nazi Germany in 1933 to live in Los Angeles, then returned home in 1949 to accept the Goethe Prize while facing demons and nostalgic ghosts. The basic scenario is reminiscent of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and Visconti’s adaptation of Mann’s own novella Death in Venice, with characters adrift on journeys of the soul. 

Mann appears as a fairly cold father figure, indifferent to his possibly suicidal son and too wrapped up in his own mythic sense of self and importance to offer much to his family. We only actually see his writer son Klaus (August Diehl) briefly, but his presence and troubled state hover hauntingly over the film.

Fatherland, aka the German vaterland, is a loaded term with multiple potential meanings. Aside from the personal angle related to Mann, the film conveys the post-traumatic atmosphere — and it’s an epic-scale global trauma — of Germany, four years post-WWII. There is the added storm of a freshly divided nation, split into East and West, and the tension of the author’s prize-hungry visit to Weimar in East Germany comes with the risk of alienation from his communist-averse adopted fatherland, the United States.

Among many other virtues in the film, Sandra Hüller’s performance as Mann’s daughter Erika is a wonder to behold, a model of restraint and perfectly timed and perfectly pitched moment of outrage. Perturbed by her father’s calloused disregard for her tortured brother, she accuses her father of being too wrapped up in his own world and massive self-image to face realities in the world or in the family. Driven to the brink, she yowls, “You have created a castle of words you can hide in.”

Count this film as another of Hüller’s highlights — along with career standouts Anatomy of a Fall, Zone of Interest, Toni Erdmann (also about a strained father-daughter relationship), and her intense role in Requiem (one of the best exorcism films ever made) 20 years ago. She may well be considered one of the world’s great living actresses. 

This is also another minor cinematic miracle from Pawlikowski, one which demands our willingness to sink into its unhurried rhythm and gradually revealing thematic undercurrents. In a genuine way, Fatherland is a film in which Papa Bach arrives to save the day and resolve battered emotional landscapes, internal and otherwise. 

See Fatherland at SBIFF’s Riviera Theatre & Film Center. For more information, see sbifftheatres.com. 

Watch the trailer here.