NewzNEW YORK (AP) — Storytelling economy can be in short supply at the movies, but Paweł Pawlikowski has made a career out of a concision that now seems almost radical. His last three films — “Ida,” “Cold War” and his latest, “Fatherland” — are all 90 minutes or less. Each is shot in black and white, in a boxy academy ratio.
And none has a single ounce of fat on it. “It feels a bit controversial what I’m doing,” Pawlikowski says, chuckling. “I’m quite aware that it’s provocative to be so stripped down.” In an era where three-hour movies are commonplace, Pawlikowski, the 69-year-old Polish filmmaker, has refined a style of less is more.
His movies are brief but unhurried, lean yet profound. “You try to distill it, distill it, distill it,” he says. That approach has made Pawlikowski a leading international filmmaker and a hero to lovers of short movies.
“Ida” (2013), about a Polish woman who finds out she’s Jewish just as she’s about to become a nun, won the Academy Award for best international film. “Cold War” (2018), about a doomed romance in postwar Poland, won him best director at the Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for best director. “Fatherland,” too, won him best director in Cannes in May.
A postwar Germany, divided between ‘Stalin or Mickey Mouse’ In the 82-minute film, which Mubi releases in select theaters Friday, Hanns Zischler plays the German Nobel Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann and Sandra Hüller his daughter, Erika. In the aftermath of World War II, they take a road trip through the ruins of Germany. They’re itinerant in their home country, traveling between U.S.-controlled Frankfurt and Soviet-controlled Weimar.
“Stalin or Mickey Mouse” is how one character frames the choice before the Manns in a Germany beginning to reckon with, or forget, the past. For Pawlikowski, it’s a dichotomy with shades of today’s political divisions. In Poland, “Ida” was criticized by right-wing nationalists who said it showed the country in a bad light.
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