How Paweł Pawlikowski Learned to Film Europe’s Fractures
The first thing you notice about the film director Paweł Pawlikowski is that he looks like a movie star. This is an unusual state of affairs. As a rule, if you happen to be—as Pawlikowski is—demonstrably tall, dark, and handsome, with a flexible sense of humor, a yen for cinema, and industrial quantities of charisma, your rightful spot is smack dab in front of the camera. So why go and lurk behind it? Why didn’t Pawlikowski become an actor? “Oh, no, I’m a terrible actor,” he says. “I never know what to do with my eyebrows.”
These days, having recently turned sixty-nine, Pawlikowski has a dusting of gray in his hair and his stubble—the annoying effect of which is to render him more, not less, like the very model of a leading man. It made complete sense, as we walked together down a street in Sarajevo, in Bosnia, when a young woman in a white dress ran ahead of us, turned around, explained that she was an actress at the National Theatre, and professed her adoration for Pawlikowski’s work. He smiled, thanked her graciously, and moved on. That kind of thing must happen all the time to Keanu Reeves, but few directors—especially middle-aged Polish directors—can be guaranteed the same treatment.
We were in Sarajevo, in the middle of August, because Pawlikowski’s latest movie, “Fatherland,” was opening the city’s annual film festival. On the first evening, it showed in multiple venues. The screening times were staggered, allowing Pawlikowski to hurry from one place to the next and introduce his film. I caught it outside, at the refreshingly named Coca-Cola Open Air Cinema, after night fell. Arriving onstage, in a white shirt and jeans, Pawlikowski bade welcome to “the people in the balcony over there,” who were watching for free from nearby apartments. He told us that “Fatherland” is “about history, how it repeats itself, about family, love, betrayal, and so on. And the good thing is, it’s not very long.” Eighty-two minutes, to be exact. These days, when a visit to the cinema can be an endurance test, such brevity puts “Fatherland” ahead of the pack before it’s even begun.
The family that Pawlikowski had in mind is the family of Mann—the novelist and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), that is, who, in 1949, heads back to his native Germany from the United States, where he has spent the wartime years. One reason for his return is the bicentenary of the birth of Goethe, on whom Mann has been invited to lecture. Now in his seventies, he is accompanied throughout the trip by his eldest daughter, Erika. (She is played by Sandra Hüller, whom American audiences last saw in “Project Hail Mary,” a movie almost twice as long as “Fatherland.”) She shaves her father in the morning, picks out his clothes, and drives him around in a stately Buick, as black and as gleaming as a hearse. Starting in West Germany, in Frankfurt, they cross to the Communist East, making for Goethe’s home town of Weimar. Wherever he goes, Mann is exhorted to pledge his allegiance. The choice confronting him is voiced, with sardonic fatigue, by his son Klaus (August Diehl), during a phone call with Erika, near the start of the film: “Stalin or Mickey Mouse?”
“Fatherland,” which opens in America on October 23rd, is the third in a triptych of works in which Pawlikowski has explored the mystery of borders, geographical and spiritual, like a doctor tenderly probing an unhealed wound. Before “Fatherland” came “Cold War” (2018), and before that was “Ida” (2014). All three films last less than an hour and a half. All three are in black-and-white, and shot in the Academy ratio—a squarish format that tightens the action and pulls it about as far from IMAX as you can get. And all three make minimal use of a moving camera; one of Pawlikowski’s inspirations for “Ida,” he told me, was his family photograph albums, five of which he has borne with him throughout a peripatetic existence. Lives can be distilled into stills.
“Cold War,” like “Fatherland,” sets off in 1949. It traces the progress of a lengthy love affair, difficult and torn, from Poland to Berlin, Paris, and Yugoslavia, before circling back to Poland. The film earned Pawlikowski the prize for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival, and was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Film. By then, it’s fair to say, he was getting full value from his tuxedo. “Ida,” the all-consuming tale of a Polish novice nun who discovers, before taking her vows, that her heritage is Jewish, and who travels in search of her past in the company of her formidable aunt, had been nominated for the same Oscar four years before. On the big night, February 22, 2015, “Ida” struck gold. Pawlikowski accepted his statuette from Chiwetel Ejiofor and Nicole Kidman, wiped his brow, and addressed the shining throng. “Oh, God, how did I get here?” he said. Good question.
Pawlikowski was born in Warsaw in 1957. His mother, Zula, was a ballet dancer from a Catholic background. As he told me, “All my Christmases, everything with my mother’s family, was very old-fashioned, high bourgeoisie.” Later, Zula became a lecturer in English at the University of Warsaw. His father, Wiktor, was a doctor, “funny guy, very witty,” and, to all appearances, entirely secular. “I didn’t have a clue my father was actually Jewish,” Pawlikowski said. Not until he was in his teens did he learn that his father’s mother had died in Auschwitz. Apart from one relative who later moved to Israel, he told me, “they were all wiped out in the war.”
To judge by photographs of Zula and Wiktor in the Pawlikowski family albums, they made a radiant couple. In one formal portrait, they pose together in sunlight, lifting their bronzed faces to the rays. As befits the only child of such deities, the young Paweł, glimpsed in a series of snapshots, is all smiles. This, you tell yourself, is not someone who grew up with no handle on happiness. Some of the films that he went on to create, as an adult, may be dark to behold, and shaded with desolation, but the darkness is never willful or worked up. At the same time, you get the sense that only a fool would not expect paradise to get lost.
Part of the paradise was onscreen. “I was obsessed with movies when I was a kid. Every time we went skiving”—playing hooky—“I went to see movies. In Communist times, in Poland, there were screenings from ten o’clock in the morning, for the late-shift working classes,” Pawlikowski said. “Poland had a really good distribution of Western cinema—a unique country in the Communist bloc.” To reap the full benefits of this blessing, you had to schlep. “I remember, there was a cinema in the distant suburbs of Warsaw showing ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire’ ”—the 1964 epic with Alec Guinness and Sophia Loren. Taking a tram, as a much loved boy, to revel in ancient battles: there are far worse ways to grow up.
Another source of rapture was music. As an English teacher, Pawlikowski’s mother was permitted to travel to the U.K., and she would return with treasures for her son. One was the Beatles’ “All My Loving” (with “Money” on the B-side), plus, he says, “a wet-look jacket.” Memory is not so much a flow, sometimes, as a series of bumps and scrapes. “In winter 1965 we went to see ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ at our local cinema, Moskwa. We queued for hours,” Pawlikowski told me, in an e-mail. “When we finally got the tickets and had time to kill, I went sliding on ice with other kids in front of the cinema. I fell and cut my head and watched the film with a bandage on my head.” Fifty-three years later, when asked by Criterion to name his favorite movies, Pawlikowski put “A Hard Day’s Night” at the top of the list. Pain and pleasure are wrapped up tight.
I first met Pawlikowski early this summer, in London, where we ate lunch and went to an exhibition of paintings by the seventeenth-century Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán: a strange environment in which to contemplate Poland in the nineteen-sixties. Pawlikowski feels he was lucky to be raised then, “when Communism went a bit softer.” In the air of his parents’ generation, he claimed, “there was so much poetic wit.” The writings of the period were “subtle, funny, ironic, with a sense of paradox,” and some of that pliability left its mark. Infusing almost every Pawlikowski film is a strain of gloomy relish. “People say to me, ‘What’s your Polish influence? Is it Polish cinema of the fifties and stuff?’ No, it’s more that kind of humor—humor with a kind of melancholy, you know?” The implication being that, in his words, “we’re all fucked anyway.”
Proof of that principle came in early 1968, when Władysław Gomułka, the leader of the Communist Party in Poland, was losing his grip on power. A scapegoat was required. In March, he gave a televised speech in which he split the country’s Jews into three categories. There were “patriotic Jews,” who were firmly embedded in Polish society, “Zionists,” and “cosmopolitans”—the slyest of anti-Jewish slurs. (Which group Gomułka’s wife, who was Jewish, fell into was not clear.) “Basically, the antisemitic Party campaign was a distraction from the student demonstrations,” Pawlikowski told me. Tear gas must have been deployed against the crowds, because he remembers “some gassed students of my mother’s seeking refuge in our flat.” He used to be sent to buy newspapers at a kiosk, but his father now told him not to go, saying, “Prasa kłamie”—the press lies.
One upshot of Gomułka’s initiative was a purge of Jewish citizens from what he called “responsible and high positions.” Another was a mass departure of Polish Jews, among them Wiktor Pawlikowski, who left in 1969. The rift was traumatizing; in the words of his son, “He truly suffered in exile.” Nothing was ever quite the same again. Wiktor and Zula divorced. She married an Englishman and, in 1971, she, too, left Poland behind, moving to England with the bewildered Paweł, who had never been there. “Me not speaking English, being into rock and roll, not having the right gear and the language—that was my main drama,” Pawlikowski told me. “I was fourteen, when you’re kind of already formed, so you can’t be molded into something completely different.”
Zula found a job at a department store in London. Pawlikowski, whose immersion in English culture had hitherto been largely musical—“Beatles, Stones, Kinks”—was packed off to “a school for Polish expatriates, called Divine Mercy College, in Henley-on- Thames. Mass every morning.” The experiment did not succeed. “The more they tried to reëducate me, the more I hated it,” Pawlikowski told me. “Then they taught me how to use a telephone, as if I’d never used a telephone in Poland: that kind of shit. Poland back then was seen by the Polish in England as a Communist nightmare, one big Gulag, whereas I had had a normal childhood.” As he recalled, there wasn’t enough to eat at the school. Worse still, “I was told to play cricket, and nobody explained to me what the fuck it was.” (He was not the first to hit that wall.) All in all, Pawlikowski said, “My problem was not with my Jewish heritage. My problem was being Polish, in the West. That was bad enough.”
Having faltered academically, the teen-age Paweł was thrown out of Divine Mercy and sent to a boarding school in Kent. He had to leave that place, too, after which the story line of his life—it’s too fragmentary and misshapen to call it a plot—was folded back on itself. He moved to Wuppertal, in northwest Germany, where his father had settled. What’s more, Zula later joined them, and the family was, for a while, reconstituted. Pawlikowski stayed in Germany for five years, from 1972 to 1977, dug in deep, and passed his exams. Wuppertal was, among other things, the home base of the Pina Bausch dance company, to which Wiktor introduced his son. “I loved her shows, though I had no idea what was going on,” Pawlikowski remembered. “When a rhinoceros appeared onstage, my father turned to me and explained that this meant the arrival of Fascism.” It made for a change from cricket.
And so the rhythm persisted: migrate, remigrate, and take it from there. Pawlikowski returned to London for a degree at Westfield College. He then went to Oxford and began to study for a Ph.D. on the Austrian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl, who died young, in 1914. That plan was interrupted by a “defection,” as Pawlikowski calls it: he fled to Turin, partly for the sake of a woman he had met but mainly, he told me, as “a way of getting away from Oxford and my ball and chain of a thesis.” The unshackling was worth it: “I ended up having the best year of my life.” It also allowed him to add to his heap of languages. By my count, Pawlikowski now speaks Polish, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. If he ever switches to sci-fi movies, he could probably get by in Martian.
Back in England, Pawlikowski realized that he didn’t want to be an academic or a full-time writer and that, despite his musical hunger, he was unlikely to cut it as a musician. (He played piano, “imitating Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett.”) He signed up for a course at a local filmmaking workshop, unconnected with the university. This remains his only practical training in the craft. As he said to the audience at a master class in Sarajevo, “Here was a medium in which I could combine all my failures.” There, you might say, is the authentic tone of Mitteleuropa—amused, highly inquisitive, lightly despairing, and unimaginable on the lips of anyone applying, for instance, to film school at U.C.L.A. What Pawlikowski needed was somewhere eccentric enough to accommodate his ambitions, whatever they might be. So it was that, in 1986, after much drifting, and approaching thirty, he washed up on the shores of the BBC.
For the many moviegoers who became conscious of Pawlikowski only at the time of “Ida,” the range of films that preceded it may come as a surprise. Not that it’s easy to get hold of the damn things, even with the aid of Vimeo and YouTube. A few remain elusive, including “Václav Havel: A Czech Drama” (1989), which is not a drama but a documentary, made in what was then Czechoslovakia before the Communist regime caved in. In short, we could use a full retrospective to plug the gaps.
True to form, Pawlikowski is modest about some of his efforts as a tyro. “Of all the directors I worked with, he was the most talented and the most self-questioning.” So says Nigel Williams, a British novelist and playwright who was a producer on “Bookmark,” a BBC documentary series that ran from 1983 to 1999. Did Pawlikowski simply come knocking on his door? “The door was never closed,” Williams told me, in late August, over lunch in London. “He just turned up in the office one day. And he’d made a film about satanism.” (Correct. It’s a short documentary called “Lucifer Over Lancashire.”) “I said, ‘I’m not really into satanism, but let’s take a look at it.’ I liked him instantly.”
Pawlikowski began as a TAP—a trainee assistant producer. “The BBC in those days was an amazing place,” Williams said. “There was total freedom.” Pawlikowski, who refers to it as “a real mensch situation,” took maximum and, it appears, nerveless advantage of such liberty. “He has complete balls, that guy,” Williams said. He remembers asking how the footage for the Havel film was going to be smuggled out of Czechoslovakia. Pawlikowski had the solution: “I’ll put it down my trousers.” One detail that you spot in all this early work is that he is credited as “Paul Pawlikowski.” Not until 2000 did he revert to “Paweł.” According to Williams, we shouldn’t read too much into this slippage of identity: “He didn’t give a shit.”
The roster of “Bookmark” films shows you the kinds of story that Pawlikowski felt impelled to tell. There was “In the Blood” (1987), set in Northern Ireland; “Palace Life” (1988), about a banned dissident Polish writer named Tadeusz Konwicki, which marked the director’s return to his native land; and “Extraordinary Adventures: The Life of Vladimir Voinovich” (1989), about a brazen Russian satirist. Then came a trio of mini-masterpieces: “From Moscow to Pietushki: A Journey with Benedict Yerofeyev” (1990), “Dostoevsky’s Travels” (1991), and “Serbian Epics” (1992). All three, as their titles suggest, confirmed the tenacity of Pawlikowski’s eastward gaze.
Yerofeyev was a hell of a creature: not just a drunkard and a writer but a visionary writer about drinking, whose headlong and scabrous prose poem, “From Moscow to Pietushki,” circulated in typescript for years before it was finally published, in 1989. “It was a cult book between me and my father,” Pawlikowski told me. In his tribute, he reconstructs the train journey described in its pages and, to the viewer’s amazement, tracks down the reclusive author not long before his death. (With a voice wrecked by throat cancer, Yerofeyev speaks through a laryngophone.) The film finds lyrical scraps at the damp and tattered edges of society, listening to a boozer on a park bench as he fondly recites the recipe for a Yerofeyev cocktail: “Anti-dandruff shampoo and cologne. Add a hundred grams of vodka. Stir it with a honeysuckle twig and drink it up, in God’s name.”
As for “Dostoevsky’s Travels,” it originated when Pawlikowski rang Williams late at night from a phone booth in St. Petersburg. “I’ve just been bitten by a stray dog,” he said, adding that he had met a man who claimed to be Dostoevsky’s great-grandson. And so it proved. The film follows Dmitri Dostoevsky, a humble tram driver, as he journeys to Western Europe, now open to visitors from former Communist lands. The whole expedition turns on a delectable irony: those who host Dmitri, in Germany and elsewhere, want him to pronounce on the consciousness of modern man, as enshrined in his great-grandfather’s fiction, whereas the one thing that he wants, more than anything, is a Mercedes.
In case you were wondering, the Mercedes functions as “an object of both symbolic and monetary value.” That’s how it was analyzed, at any rate, in “ReFocus: The Films of Paweł Pawlikowski,” an academic study published last year. Pawlikowski has not been able to bring himself to read it, although he does like the cover. (Rightly so; it makes him look like the Terminator, striding along in shades.) One oddity of the book is that, despite its inquiries into the director’s interrogation of “hegemonic national discourses,” not once does it observe how funny those interrogations can be. In person, Pawlikowski is wry and convivial, with a taste for good food and for absurdities both fleeting and profound, and his geniality carries over into even his most wounded works. The hapless hero of “Dostoevsky’s Travels” is savored rather than roasted by the movie, and this grants him a certain shrewd dignity. That difficult balance is sustained, under far more testing conditions, in “Serbian Epics.”
Not many literary documentaries are set in an active war zone. In the case of “Serbian Epics,” however, literature was the way in—or, as Pawlikowski has said, a Trojan horse. A major character in the film is the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, who is introduced with an onscreen title: “Poet and Psychiatrist.” He solemnly sits in front of the camera playing the gusla, a bowed musical instrument that makes a noise like a baritone bee, and singing along: “There were thirty chieftains drinking wine /Among the vast crags of the Romanija Mountain.” Karadžić, in his own eyes, is upholding the oral tradition of his people, whose territorial claims, mythologized in verse and blessed by the Church, must, if necessary, be defended in blood; where better to unfold such grandeur than to a BBC program called “Bookmark”?
The access that Pawlikowski managed to get, on this basis, is dumbfounding. He sits in on a meeting of the Serbian war cabinet, chaired by Karadžić, who points at a map of the conflict, on which thick black lines show the areas claimed by the Serbs—geopolitics by Sharpie. “It’s not right that Croatia should have all the coast and we have none,” he proclaims, as if a coastline were cake at a children’s birthday party. We hear no commentary in this or any other scene; forsaking voice-overs, Pawlikowski lets his camera do all the moral work. Bathos is not hard to come by. Up on a hill overlooking Sarajevo, Karadžić, the proud champion of his nation, huddles inside a little red pod, formerly part of a cable car, trying to make a phone call to his wife while petting a puppy that larks around at his feet.
On a hot Saturday, Pawlikowski and I revisited those heights—the slopes from which, for almost four years, starting in the spring of 1992, Serbian artillery pounded Sarajevo, which lies vulnerably cupped in the valley below. We had coffee at Sunnyland, a playground with a gentle roller coaster and a giant swing. “Adventure Awaits You,” a poster announced. Around us, other customers were enjoying the weekend at their leisure, including many Muslim families, the women in head scarves. “It’s Karadžić’s nightmare!” Pawlikowski said, with visible delight.
Nearby was the city’s Jewish graveyard, where the tombs are laid out around a steep flight of steps. There, in the early nineties, the living fought fiercely among the dead. One of the combatants was a poet. “He didn’t know the war had started, because he was hungover or drunk or something,” Pawlikowski told me. “So the first thing he did was try to flee to his home town of Han Pijesak to stay with his mother. He hid there, then he was dragged out by the Serb military police as a deserter—because he was a Serb, he should be fighting. And they threw his battalion straight into the Jewish cemetery, which was like a killing field.” (Pawlikowski recalled the poet’s mordant report: “There’s a layer of dead Jews, and dead Bosnians, Muslims, and then us.”) The tale took a twist: “Two military police turned up and dragged him away, so he was convinced he was going to be shot.” Another twist: “He got dragged to the press office of this colleague of his, who then nominated him as second-in-command for P.R. And this guy was totally useless, alcoholic. His hands were trembling.” Having been rescued from the teeth of death, the poet had a new complaint: “Oh, it’s so boring without the Muslims.”
Even before “Serbian Epics” was shown on TV, it caused “a huge scandal,” according to Pawlikowski. A motion in the House of Commons in December, 1992, expressed dismay at the film, or, to be precise, at a listing of the film in the BBC schedule, which hinted at pro-Serb sympathies. To anyone who had actually seen the documentary, with its droll depiction of collective self-aggrandizement, this was hogwash. What the movie thrives on is the farcical and, all too often, horrendous reach of human error; surreal episodes are not cooked up but happened upon or stumbled over. As Pawlikowski said to me, in Sarajevo, “I was being anthropological.” As we walked around the city—which, as he says, “has always had its own urban identity, accent, the way they drink, the way they celebrate”—he kept summoning up incidents and individuals from more than thirty years before. One block of buildings, opposite a soccer stadium, close to what used to be the front line, touched off a particular memory: “There was a sniper woman, a mother of three, who every day went up to the top floor somewhere and sniped. A Serbian woman, very nice. She was picking people off, you know, in Sniper’s Alley.”
Like the poet in the cemetery, the sniper mother is still fresh in Pawlikowski’s mind. So is Nikola Koljević, “a scholar in Shakespeare studies at Sarajevo University, but he was part of this Serbian government besieging his own university.” When a world gets turned upside down, the people inside follow suit. Rarely, it seems to me, has Pawlikowski been roused by themes or issues or arguments. Rather, it is characters who have muscled their way to the forefront of his imagination. The question naturally arises: Why not make them up?
Defining the line where nonfiction fades and drama dawns is a challenge. For Pawlikowski, it was yet another border to cross. He admired Ken Loach’s “Kes” (1969)—“documentary texture, nonprofessional actors, good faces, good landscape, small story that goes a long way,” as he told me. He could be describing “Twockers” (1998), which he made for the BBC in collaboration with a friend, Ian Duncan, and which tells of a kid and his mates, in a depleted community in the North of England, who break into cars and houses. A singsong dialect binds them together; they don’t steal a TV, they steal a “teggy-veggy.”
Put like that, “Twockers” sounds like a burst of indignant social realism—hardly uncommon in British cinema in the period of Margaret Thatcher’s dominance and its long aftermath. The plots of Pawlikowski’s next two films, “Last Resort” (2000) and “My Summer of Love” (2004), would seem to be singing a comparable tune. The first is about a Russian woman and her son, newly arrived in England and confined by immigration authorities to a scruffy seaside town, where her sole chance of employment is to perform in online porn; the second tells of a relationship between two young women, one working class and the other (played by Emily Blunt, in her first starring role) more educated, and gilded with the languor of wealth. This being England, their love is doomed by the gulf of the social divide.
If you watch these movies, however, you feel more haunted than hectored. It’s true that Pawlikowski, himself an immigrant, is instinctively drawn to the lost and the marooned. (“Britain is very good for being able to stay an outsider, for not having to fit in too much,” he told me.) On the other hand, he’s not seeking to persuade us of anything, politically or otherwise; he is passing on visions, which bloom in unlikely terrain. The eye of a dead man, whose home has been burgled by a couple of lads, in “Twockers,” is filmed from inches away, with a fly crawling over the sightless orb; “My Summer of Love” kicks off with an eye being drawn on a wall, swiftly followed by two other eyes in closeup—one of a human, who is lying in grass, and the other of a horse.
Fans of Pawlikowski, inspecting his filmography, will be struck by the hiatus that opened up between “My Summer of Love” and its successor, “The Woman in the Fifth” (2011). Lord knows, there are many reasons—funding, casting, development hell—that movies fail to get made. For Pawlikowski, though, the troubles that put his professional life on hold were more private, and immeasurably sadder. In 1989, he had married a Russian pianist, Irina. They met in London, though she hailed from the Caucasus. (“She knew ‘From Moscow to Pietushki’ by heart,” he told me. “It was a sign.”) They were together for seventeen years, and had two children, Wiktor and Maria. Irina died in 2006, and Pawlikowski paused his filmmaking career to raise the children on his own.
To learn that “The Woman in the Fifth” was made by a man who had, not long before, passed through the valley of the shadow of grief doesn’t explain the movie, yet it comes as little surprise. The atmosphere is desperate and stunned. Pawlikowski, at the master class in Sarajevo, referred to the film as “well directed, if I say so myself, but it didn’t really work.” The plot, very loosely adapted from a book by Douglas Kennedy, concerns Tom (Ethan Hawke), an American novelist who gets stranded in Paris, broke, with a gluey case of writer’s block. The most piercing verdict on his predicament is made by the enigmatic Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas), whom he encounters at a party. “You needed a good disaster to get you started,” she says. “A real tragedy, if you play your cards right.”
In what ways the life of a creative artist, and the deaths that inevitably scar it, can leak into the ensuing work—through the cracks of a poem, or a movie, or a song—is, let’s face it, a conundrum that has been worried into exhaustion. But you can’t help raising it if you warm to Pawlikowski’s films, because they are so question-strewn, and so clearly indebted to the histories, grand and minor, of his time.
As a graduate student, for example, he met Helena Wolińska-Brus, the elderly Jewish wife of an Oxford professor. Years later, it was revealed that she had been a Polish military prosecutor, at whose bidding a number of former anti-Nazi freedom fighters had been arrested and tried; one hero of the wartime resistance, who refused to work with the postwar Communist administration, was executed. For that reason, the Polish government requested Wolińska-Brus’s extradition from Britain, though in vain. Pawlikowski hoped to interview her about her life. “She said no, and then she died,” he told me. Yet that was not the end of the affair. “I just kept her in my back pocket, as an idea.”
Maybe that’s what separates the born storytellers of this world from the rest of us: they have deeper back pockets. What Pawlikowski plucked out, in due course, was Wanda Gruz (Agata Kulesza), the heroine’s aunt in “Ida,” and a strong candidate for the most dauntingly memorable character in twenty-first-century cinema. As Pawlikowski is at pains to emphasize, Wanda is “not a portrait” of Wolińska-Brus. Without that living spark, though, would the invented woman have caught fire? Wanda—“Red Wanda, that’s me” she says, with a twinge of acerbic pride—is a former state prosecutor, Stalinist in her rigor, who sent people to their deaths. Now a judge, suavely dressed and robed in self-contempt, she drinks to excess and sleeps around as if to eradicate any threat of love. One morning, she sprinkles sugar on her bread and chomps like a starving child; has a bath and a smoke; then, to the calmative strain of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony, stubs out her last cigarette and leaps from an open window. Watching that sequence in a movie theatre was a drama in itself. I sensed the audience rear back in their seats, as if hit by a shock wave. Horror films, you could say, throw a similar punch, but jump scares tend to be relieved by laughs. With “Ida,” there was no such release.
For someone so vivacious, Pawlikowski is an expert purveyor of mortal facts. At the end of “Cold War,” the couple who have tried and failed to live without each other come to a tranquil understanding: they will die together instead. In the broken shell of a chapel, near a remote crossroads in Poland—the same location had been used in “Ida”—Zula (Joanna Kulig) and Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) swallow a handful of pills and make their vows, as if they were getting married. They sit on a bench. “Let’s go to the other side,” she says. “The view will be better there.” They stand up and walk out of the frame. And that’s it. The words “For my parents” appear onscreen, and the circle is complete. Pawlikowski’s mother and father, also named Zula and Wiktor, whose unmanageable love had kept them tangled and disentangled for decades, took their own lives in 1989, as the Cold War that had cast its chill upon their time was beginning to thaw.
There is a suicide in “Fatherland,” too, although we don’t witness it. All that we see is Erika Mann, as she hears the mournful news. Like Ingmar Bergman—and “Fatherland” owes something to Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries” (1957), another bitter and reflective pilgrimage—Pawlikowski is given to measuring events by their impact on the human face. At the start of “Twockers,” as a kid is urged to stop loafing around and get a job, it’s him we see, and not his adult adviser. Likewise, in “Ida,” when the heroine (Agata Trzebuchowska) is told, “You’re a Jew,” we get a half-length shot of her in her nun’s habit, holding steady, with her dark, unblinking eyes, as she absorbs this tumultuous information. Those eyes! I asked Pawlikowski about them. “Contact lenses,” he replied.
Ida’s stillness is shared by the whole film, which seems more confidently rooted than anything in Pawlikowski’s previous endeavors. “For the first time, I was really on firm ground with what I wanted,” he said. He was back on home turf, in Poland, with a narrow budget, discarding inessentials. “When you limit the elements and actors and locations and props, then you can drill in,” he told me. “Limit yourself, and that frees you up.” Objects become loaded with intent; a skull is unearthed and bundled inside a silk scarf. Pawlikowski describes all this as “a big breakthrough,” though it sounds more like an epiphany. “I also had this moment of rejection of cinema, you know? I said, ‘Fuck cinema.’ ” Part of the rejecting was what he calls “this radical decision not to move the camera, and to frame things in a very amateurish way, with a lot of headroom.” The aim was “to make things happen within the shot.”
To anyone viewing the result, the heavy, looming space above the characters feels like the pressure of their intolerable thoughts; to Ryszard Lenczewski, however, the director of photography on “Ida,” it was all askew, and he quit the project. Pawlikowski asked the camera operator, a young guy named Łukasz Żal, to take over temporarily. “In two days, a weight was lifted from my shoulders,” the director says. He and Żal have worked together ever since.
So determined are “Ida,” “Cold War,” and “Fatherland,” in their careful dramatic momentum, that you assume they must all be _pre_determined. Not so. “I don’t like this business of writing at a desk,” Pawlikowski said to me. In recent times, he has worked in Greece, on the island of Hydra, where he has a place. But the best lines, he believes, are produced “spontaneously, in situ.” Collaborations can help, “sometimes with a co-writer. Then I do it with actors, and then I do it while I’m location scouting and rehearsing and shooting.” In other words, “the filmmaking is part of the writing.”
A case in point: there is a scene in “Fatherland” in which Thomas Mann is greeted by two young men at a reception. In the script, he asks, “How is your mother?”—“ihre Mutter,” in German. On set, however, Hanns Zischler, playing Mann, suggested changing the words to “ihre Frau Mutter”—“your good lady mother,” let’s say, stiffened with old-fashioned courtesy. The tweak stayed in, and one can see why. The youths are, in fact, grandsons of Wagner, and their mother is the composer’s daughter-in-law; they request that Mann assist in reviving Wagner’s reputation, which has been sullied by the Nazis’ eager embrace of his music. Polite to a fault, not raising his voice, Mann responds, “Bayreuth should be razed to the ground, and your mother should be on trial.”
The role of Mann fits Zischler like a handmade suit. He is the veteran of two notable films set along the fault lines of his country—Wim Wenders’s “Kings of the Road” (1976) and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Germany Year 90 Nine Zero” (1991). Moreover, he is not only an actor but an author, steeped in Goethe, and he wrote a deeply researched book on the moviegoing habits of Franz Kafka. (It’s hard to picture the writer of “The Trial” watching Chaplin’s “The Kid,” in 1922, but he did, twice.) Indeed, so erudite is Zischler that, in the midst of shooting “Fatherland,” Pawlikowski advised him, “Don’t think too much about what you know.”
I talked to Zischler, the soul of geniality, over tea and cakes in his apartment, in a peaceful western patch of Berlin. Pawlikowski, he told me, had issued an ominous warning before filming commenced: “He said, ‘I’m going to be cruel to you.’ But he was never cruel.” It was more a matter of being resolute. As Zischler puts it, “He knows very well what he wants.” The rapport between Pawlikowski and Żal? “Osmotic.” And that tricky space above the actors’ heads? “It’s a narration in itself.” Pay attention, Zischler proposed, to all the doors that open and close in the film—the entrances and exits that mark the progress of the tale. “It’s like turning the pages of an album,” he said. I thought of the family photograph albums, so close to Pawlikowski’s heart.
There is an extraordinary travelling shot, early in “Fatherland,” that sets the ruined scene. From inside the car, with Erika at the wheel, and a motorcyclist leading onward like a herald, we see the streets of Frankfurt passing by, still gutted by wartime bombs. Nowhere in modern Germany, it seems, was sufficiently ramshackle; Lower Silesia, in Poland, had to play the part. A related problem arose with the human backdrop. Pawlikowski told me that he and his casting assistants spent five months looking for extras, just to find the right faces for the period. Back then, “people didn’t know how they looked. That’s one reason I stopped making documentaries,” he said. Nowadays, “everyone photographs themselves all the time, so they know what photography does to them.”
“Fatherland” also plays with the puzzle of history. In reality, it was Mann’s wife, not Erika, who went with him to Germany in 1949. Pawlikowski reconfigured the journey—the emotional dynamic—to his satisfaction, and it’s hard to cavil at the outcome. Consider Erika, in Weimar, walking out of a lecture hall, unable to bear yet another speech by her famous father. Pawlikowski, surveying the city, came across a graveyard that was adorned with old statues, worn by lichen and time; and that is where Erika strolls, seeking refuge, on a bright day. Unexpectedly, like a dancer, the camera stirs and glides. Why now? Zischler has a theory: “Erika wants to prevent Thomas becoming a monument.”
It’s a fine and persuasive reading of the sequence, and, I would say, of the entire film. As Erika wisely perceives, Mann is being both honored and used, passing through a land on which he is expected to pronounce but where he no longer feels at ease. “Where is home?” he is asked by an American journalist at a press conference. “My home now is in California,” he says. “But where my Heimat is, where I belong, is a much more difficult question.”
That question has nagged at Pawlikowski’s output, from his earliest documentaries to the present day. Stand back, and you see a pattern emerge: a continual, delicate dialogue between fixity and flux. Think of Dmitri Dostoevsky, roaming the used-car dealerships of Germany in search of his motorized dream; of the frontiers that are tussled over in “Serbian Epics,” in the cause of ethnic bullying; of the Russian woman and her son in “Last Resort,” stuck in an England that doesn’t want them, pleading first to stay and then to leave; and, in “Cold War,” of the Polish consular official, in Paris, who says to the lovelorn hero, “You’re not French, and you’re not a Pole, either. As far as we’re concerned, you don’t exist.”
“Fatherland” is supported by twin pillars: not just Thomas Mann but also Goethe, whose house Mann visits, in awkward reverence, and whose death mask is shown in closeup, gleaming as white as bone. It was Goethe—Germany incarnate—who declared, in a letter of 1799, “The fatherland of the man who thinks without prejudice, who can rise above his time, is nowhere and everywhere.” Whether that’s a promise or a cautionary tale is up to you.
And what of Pawlikowski himself? Where is his home of homes? These days, he spends time on Hydra, with his second wife, Malgorzata Bela, whom he married in 2017; last year, he made a short film with her there, titled “Muse.” When in Warsaw, he lives on the street where he grew up; he also makes frequent trips to London, where he sees his children and stays with an old friend, Alfonso Cuarón, the director of “Gravity” and “Roma.” A master of stillness, Paweł Pawlikowski is still on the move. The little boy from Warsaw is running free. Sitting in a café in Sarajevo, he said to me, “Every film has to be a roof over my head for three years.” It’s not such a bad place to live. ♦