I thought that we could build our nest high up, in the trees. Fly away, like birds – to the mountains.1939, Austria. Peasant farmer and devout Catholic Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) is married to Franziska aka Fani (Valerie Pachner), and they are important members of the tight-knit rural community where they live a simple life with the passing years marked by the birth of three daughters. Franz is called up for basic training in the German army and is away from his beloved wife and children for months. When France surrenders and it seems the war might end soon, he is sent back from training and he and his wife farm the land and raise their children. As the war proceeds, Jägerstätter and the other able-bodied men in the village are called up to fight. They must first swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler and the Third Reich but despite social pressure Jägerstätter refuses. He is taken to prison, first in Enns where Captain Herder (Matthias Schoenaerts) is his tormentor then in Berlin and waits months for his trial. During his time in prison, he and Fani write letters to each other and give each other strength. Fani and their daughters are victims of growing hostility in the village but Fani is eventually able to visit her husband in Berlin.After months of brutal incarceration, his case goes to trial under Judge Lueben (Bruno Ganz) … There’s a difference between the kind of suffering we can’t avoid and a suffering we choose. You wait twenty years for a Terrence Malick film and then a whole lot come along at once and in truth most of them aren’t much cop and are decidedly lacking in narrative rigour. That the worst starred Ben Affleck is probably just a coincidence. Even Malick has realised you can’t get away with just shooting pretty pictures and keep an audience awake no matter how transcendental the image-making – there is a chasm of difference between thoughtful and ponderous. He reportedly stated, Lately – I keep insisting, only very lately – have I been working without a script and I’ve lately repented the idea. The last picture we shot, and we’re now cutting, went back to a script that was very well ordered. So in a complete U-turn he has a story that’s actually a biography with a beginning, middle and end. Albeit the real ending is a coda provided by beatification (surely the logical conclusion of all Malick films). The performances by a range of familiar faces are nuanced and true. And of course it looks beautiful, courtesy of the luminous cinematography by Joerg Widmer who has been camera operator for Malick since The New World. It was shot in 2016 and was in post-production for more than two years. The beautiful score by James Newton Howard incorporates works by Bach, Dvorak, Gorecki and Handel and assumes the mantle of love to match the pictures. It is one of Malick’s finest films, probing matters of faith, conscience and hope and shows that even the awful Germanic people occasionally boasted a conscientious objector not in thrall to the evil ideology of Nazism. Inspired by Eliot’s Middlemarch. The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs
mondomovies 