fatherland…

I went along to the Watershed this afternoon (it’s been a long time!) to see Paweł Pawlikowski’s film “Fatherland” (shot in monochrome by Lukasz Zal).
Set in 1949 (the year of my birth), celebrated novelist Thomas Mann (who fled the Nazis before the war) has returned home and first visits Frankfurt (West Germany) to receive an award named after Goethe (and is assigned a CIA liaison), but embarrasses his hosts by announcing his intention to accept a second award in Weimar (Soviet Germany).
Mann evidently aspires to float free from history, it seems… but where is his commitment?
Mann (played by Hanns Zischler) is accompanied by his long-suffering daughter Erika (brilliantly played by Sandra Hüller). It’s a complex story – which I won’t even try to unravel – about cold war acrimony, family conflict and tragedy, betrayal, and the impossibility of going home.
It’s a powerful, very impressive film.
Note 1: Amid all the sombre greyness, the film’s other ‘star’ is the gleaming, black 1948 Buick Super.
Note 2: For me, I always associate Thomas Mann with his novella ‘Death In Venice’ - drawing in part on his own experience in Venice during the 1911 cholera epidemic (and, of course, the wonderful film of the same name).