A beautiful film about an ugly past.
A Hidden Life
Grade: B+
Director: Terence Malick
Screenplay: Malick
Cast: Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael Nyqvist
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 2 h 53 m
By: John DeSando
“How simple life was then.” Fani (Valerie Pachner)
Auteur Terence Malick’s brilliant A Hidden Life is just as beautifully photographed by DP Jorg Widmer as you’d expect from the acclaimed director. The Austrian countryside is mountain green and moody, but not really simple anymore for our heroes.
Nazi conscientious objector Franz (August Diehl) and his wife, Fani, knew much better times before he refused to swear allegiance to Hitler. The three-hour depiction of their troubled life, right down to his imprisonment and execution, is ironically one of the most beautiful films of the year and one of the most disturbing.
The contrast between the bucolic life and the imprisoned one is best served by lush landscapes juxtaposed with starkly cruel prisons. Malick succeeds in having us fall in love with the land and the heroic couple at the same time. Sometimes there seem to be short- lens anamorphic shots, with everything distorted but the center, emphasizing the loneliness of rebellion while the wide-lens landscapes offer hope of a better time sadly not to come soon enough.
Don’t be fooled by my exuberant appreciation of this romance gone bad, for it is a hard study of payment due for a Christian man to have scruples, when it would have been easy for him to sign the oath but believe inside the opposite. It is not the dialogue that will put you squarely in support of the futile objection; it is the simplicity of Franz’s devotion to what is good to do, and his wife’s support of that as death knell.
As might be expected, few fellow Austrians support Franz, and just as few Germans seemed to realize the horror that was Hitler. The story has Christ-suffering similarities: Franz was declared a martyr by Pope Benedict, and for those today who oppose autocrats, let this be a warning that opposition to authority comes with a heavy payment.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
