Pawel Pawlikowski‘s elegantly chiseled, black-and-white post-war road movie “Fatherland” was widely tipped during this year’s just-wrapped Cannes Film Festival to win the Palme d’Or. While it only walked away with Best Director for Pawel Pawlikowski (who shared it with Los Javis for their “The Black Ball,” and also won the same prize in 2018 for “Cold War”), “Fatherland” announced itself as a major early Oscar contender out of the Cannes competition.
The film stars Sandra Hüller as actress/writer Erika Mann and Hanns Zischler as her father, the author Thomas Mann, who travel from U.S.-controlled Frankfurt to Soviet-dominated Weimar, Germany, in 1949 after living in California in exile for more than a decade. A black Buick takes the father and daughter through a postwar land in ruins, where Thomas Mann is set to receive the Goethe prize for his literary contributions. Meanwhile, their family is already deeply fractured, a wound stemming from Erika’s relationship with her twin brother, Klaus Mann (August Diehl).
As Pawlikowski told IndieWire about casting Hüller, “You watch the transformation of her face, and it really, really happens. She doesn’t seem to be acting. She has this fake smile, and then in her eyes, what happens there? There was one take where things come to the surface, brilliantly, in a way that’s not scripted and not acted, it mysteriously unfolds.”
Indeed, Hüller is a potential Best Actress contender for “Fatherland,” along with her performance in Markus Schleinzer’s “Rose” (also coming from Mubi), which won her best actress at the Berlinale. Plus, the “Anatomy of a Fall” Oscar nominee is in the Best Supporting Actress race for “Project Hail Mary.”
Per my IndieWire review, “the aching black-and-white, the Academy aspect ratio, the streak of fatalism running between dueling identities,” it’s all there for Pawlikowski fans and of his films like “Cold War” and “Ida.” “It’s another austere, rigorously crafted odyssey through European postwar regret” — but at the center of the movie is a father-daughter story that will move audiences.
Mubi releases “Fatherland” in the United States theatrically this fall. Check out the film’s first trailer below.
