“I have no idea how to handle the present,” remarks Paweł Pawlikowski, the film-maker dressed all in black in a French Riviera hotel garden. “I don’t have a handle on it. I’m experiencing the world as a kind of science fiction. I’d love to read about it in 50 years. The past, I know about. It’s also the generation of my parents, of people I know. I remember the Cold War period.”
Over the past decade or so, the Polish-born Pawlikowski, 69, has not only embraced the recent past, he has recreated it on film with an absolute mastery of tone and texture. His 2013 film Ida, a black-and-white road movie set in 1962, followed a woman on the verge of becoming a Catholic nun who discovers her parents were Jewish. It became the first Polish film to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
He followed it in 2018 with another monochrome miniature-piece, Cold War, a tortured love story between a musical director and a singer, loosely inspired by his own parents’ lives. Winning him Best Director in Cannes, it got three Oscar nominations, including in the directing category (ironically, he lost to Mexico’s Alfonso Cuarón, for his own black-and-white auto-fiction Roma).
Now comes Fatherland, a majestic-looking work that completes this loose trilogy of black-and-white postwar films. It follows a semi-fictionalised journey through a war-torn Germany taken by Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann (played by Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller). Again, Pawlikowski won Best Director in Cannes – this time shared with the Spanish directors of the upcoming La Bola Negra.
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