Part historical piece, part political obsession, by Paweł Pawlikowski Homeland It concludes the Polish director’s loose trilogy set in the aftermath of World War II. Follow his fellow black and white dramas Ida (2013) and cold war (2018), the director’s latest film, which won the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, in a tie with La Pola Negra-Simple on the surface, it unfolds with often academic candor. However, within its slim 82-minute running time, it conceals larger reflections on the state of the world.
The story is set in 1949, and follows two official visits made by the famous German novelist Thomas Mann (Hans Zischler) on both sides of the inner German border, a few years before the erection of the Berlin Wall. However, amidst personal tragedy, his strained relationships with his children, and the looming specter of tyranny, Thomas’s long-awaited return from American exile becomes complicated, in a tale that examines the nature of freedom and artistic and personal oppression.
The film belongs to a wonderful trio of actors, between Zeichler’s forceful reticence as the Nobel laureate – who tries to hide his more passionate political views, so he can’t contain them – and the actors playing his famous adult children. Sandra Höller (winner of this year’s Best Actress in Berlin) plays his daughter, attendant and translator Erika, a shadow of her father who similarly returns to a broken Germany after years on the run from the Nazis. They are similar in most ways, except for Thomas’s disapproval of his “addict” son, Klaus (August Diehl), whose depressing phone call to Erika begins the film.
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Homeland ★★★ (3/4 stars) |
We first meet Klaus sitting at the foot of his bed in a cramped Cannes apartment, where his lover is still asleep, regaling his sister with his bitter opinions about Germany’s attempts at post-Nazi reconstruction. Klaus’s fractured identity as a German man is one that he likens to the rifts in his family life, though not merely as a distant allegory. The two ideas are intrinsically linked, with him describing German as “a language invented for lying,” before discussing the ways in which Thomas is overly proficient at this particular function.
Klaus doesn’t interact with Thomas on screen, and rarely engages the viewer with Erika either—at most, the film cuts between them and connects them across space in ghostly ways—ensuring that the film’s editing helps establish the trio’s tense dynamics early on. This internal turmoil soon colored political visits by father and daughter, first to US-controlled Frankfurt, where Thomas received the Goethe Prize under CIA surveillance, and then to Weimar in the Soviet Eastern Bloc, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of the laureate, the writer and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
During these twin visits, Thomas flirts with (or rather passively accepts) the possibility that his words will eventually be distorted and his actions turned into propaganda. Whether or not he will retreat – and to what degree – is in question, but the constant dichotomy between the “first” and “second” worlds is on every character’s mind. Klaus, for example, sees this abyss as a choice between “Stalin and Mickey Mouse,” a dichotomy reflected in the visits themselves, as the overt and subconscious transgression of each faction makes its way into every conversation.
Despite being a revered guest on both sides of the border, there is a sense that Thomas is besieged by unseen forces at every turn. For example, caught between two grandsons of Richard Wagner at a social gathering—who insist that his work be separated from its Nazi confiscations without consequence—and in more private moments, Thomas is rarely able to express his grief to his daughter Erika when he relays news of a death in the family. The characters’ three ideological choices leave them between a rock, a hard place, and a frying pan, as it were Homeland It was an echo of the many turning points society faces today, between the iron fist of far-right fascism and the choice between free market and socialist ideologies – not to mention the ways in which art can be co-opted and abused by anyone with an agenda. As the world teeters on the brink of inevitable transformation, what may or may not any of us want to do?
The film may not place its strong commitments in a contemporary political context (beyond the rejection of de-Nazification through quiet reintegration), but its setting revolves around a political moment so massive that it is emotionally terrifying. Perhaps the story should have been more detailed, in its exploration of its characters’ points of view – that Erika and even Thomas himself may also have been eccentric, is only touched upon within the text, making the latter’s rejection of Klaus more complex – but in the process, Pawlikowski turns Homeland to a hard-hitting channel for the intimate themes and ideas he’s been playing with for over a decade.
Like his previous two films, about Polish characters reconsidering modern history, Homeland It is the story of a family for whom their return to their “homeland” in a divided Germany is distinctly foreign – a feeling that in turn defines their relationships with each other. And like cold warit is also about the compromise between art as emotional expression and political propaganda, something that Thomas experiences as merely a fact of his existence in this new and unfamiliar world. Pawlikowski himself has long had to reckon with the encroachment of far-right sentiment across Europe, and given his past as a Polish exile during the Cold War – settling for a period in West Germany, no less – his own perspective seems defined by his upbringing among disparate loyalties. (This will certainly affect one’s sense of self.)
However, so Homeland Intricately linked to the personal life of its creator, it is not a virtue in itself, although it may reveal some of its meaning. The film’s emotional power — though delayed by design, as Zischler peels back Thomas’s layers with Erika’s help — is defined by its aesthetic approach, which sees Pawlikowski and master cinematographer Lukasz Zall craft tight, striking 4:3 frames that constantly isolate the Mann family from the people and ideas around them. Only a few disturbed allies are allowed to enter their orbit completely.
Sticking to your convictions can be a lonely road, especially when balancing self-preservation. This path is made more complicated by unspoken generational sieges, but these quiet interruptions are not just a metaphor for the wider world. Rather, it is a central aspect of political life, and acts as bridges between different political eras and eras. Homeland It may find refinement in its restraint, but its still frames contain the weight and movement of history, making it feel, in its strongest moments, monumental and poetic.
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