‘Fatherland’, Pawel Pawlikowski’s third black-and-white film in his post-war trilogy, won him the Best Director Award in Cannes. It was also the opening film at the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival. Much of the film is shot in or from a car and in one of the earlier scenes we drive through a devastated, bombed-out Frankfurt. Watching it in Sarajevo, this proves one of the many mise en abyme moments, as it makes me think of the devastation the town endured during the wars of the 90s, with the destroyed and then restored library building just to the left of the open-air screen.

The film starts with the face of August Diehl, who, for me, can never put a foot wrong and here inhabits Klaus Mann to perfection. Another mise en abyme moment must have been felt in its world premiere in Cannes, when the world-weary Diehl/Mann is the first image to appear in the film, talking on the phone to his sister about how he wants to end it all, in Cannes.

The Manns are a sprawling clan. As a Ph.D. student in Germany, the first mug I bought featured the faces of a few of them. At the time I was only familiar with Thomas Mann, and had bought ‘Buddenbrooks’ in German, thinking I would go through all the Manns during my time in Germany. But Germany, in a trademark gesture, repelled all my attempts at getting close to it and possibly loving it. This, if I flatter myself, is the central theme in ‘Fatherland’. Two Germans return to Germany after they’ve left it because it had become unlovable, try very hard to love it again, but it keeps rejecting their attempts. And this is how Klaus haunts the narrative: he has already seen it’s undoable and has committed the ultimate rejection himself.

While Thomas Mann keeps his patriarchal cool and speaks at several literary events, we see the frustration of this attempt to reconnect mostly through the reactions of Erika – the one female face I remember from that mug. Sandra Hüller has returned to form here, after her somewhat stilted ‘Rose’ (Yes, I can hear you say that’s what that role needed). Erika is, by all measures, a devoted daughter, acting the secretary for her father as he visits his birth country to collect awards from both West and East German authorities. In their conversations in Frankfurt, both father and daughter make it clear that the public assessment of what they are seeing in this country that is being rebuilt will be dependent on Germans behaving themselves from now on.

There’s a long, very Pawlikowski scene at the reception after Thomas Mann receives his Goethe Prize. The camera moves along the tables and lands on the bar where Erika talks to people she knew from her past and then the camera does a sweep of the whole room through her eyes. This reminded me of the scene in ‘Cold War’ (2018) where our feted musicologist is surveying the room from the bar, with a huge mirror at the back, reflecting the chattering, drinking crowd. Though there was no mirror in this one, you again got a sense of the crowd as a collective, a heaving beast. There were other elements that rhymed with ‘Cold War,’ such as the blond ‘entertainment’ singer with a slight accent who we can attribute a backstory because we know Zula’s.

The administrative and cultural elite of Nazi Germany are very much present at this reception, rehabilitated in order to build the country anew. Naturally, Erika is not having any of it: after a short, acerbic conversation with a man in which we learn that she had been an actress and that this man used to be her husband who collaborated with the Nazis, she slaps him. At the same reception, Thomas Mann is cornered by two men whom he seems to have known as children and then the conversation, like in Erika’s, slowly reveals who they are: the sons of Richard Wagner. When they ask Mann’s help to reinstate the Bayreuth Festival, Mann does not go so far as to slap the Wagners but strictly puts them in their place with an acid rejection.

While the audience cheers the father-daughter resolve, they receive the news of Klaus’s death by overdose. Klaus has given up on the world that the father and daughter are trying to put right through conversation, retribution and possibly reconciliation. The night Erika hears the news of her brother’s death, we follow her to her hotel room. She’s trying to calm her nerves when she hears drunk German men sing a song in the street about raping Polish women and she shouts at them, calling them fascist. The iron resolve she has shown throughout the evening fails and recoils into her room, crying. We have all been there and some of us have booked a one-way flight to Istanbul immediately.

Everyone will naturally see ‘Fatherland’ through their own relationship with Germany. If one can set these visceral reactions aside, there is much aesthetic pleasure in Pawlikowski's film – the car the Manns drive in is a delight in design and one wonders how humanity could have regressed so much in machine-making. The car takes us into Weimar, East Germany, where the Manns are entertained in a communist fashion, complete with Potemkin villagers waving flags at their car as they pass by. While the fascists have taken on a respectable veneer in Frankfurt, in Weimar the old ways are still at work and Pawlikowski makes a point of showing a scene where an activist is violently taken away from the Manns’ door as he’s trying to explain the plight of dissidents.

At the end of the film the director returns to one of his visual markers that again rhymes with ‘Cold War’, the abandoned building in the countryside. Here, after all their trials and tribulations the father and daughter finally have a chance to commune with their fatherland without politics getting in the way. It is a beautiful ending to a beautiful film, yet I found myself wanting more, feeling that just as we had begun to know these characters more intimately, the film was asking us to leave them.