Spiritual war epic delves into the soul of a conscientious objector
A Hidden Life
Cannes Film Festival
Dir Terrence Malick Starring August Diehl, Valerie Pachner
Revered director Terrence Malick’s first film to compete in Cannes since 2011’s Palme d’or-winning The Tree of Life is also his best picture since then by a long chalk – a sombre spiritual war epic about the defining moral crisis of the last century, which surges up to claim its place among the filmmaker’s most deeply felt achievements.
The first close-up goes to Hitler, in footage of a pre-war parade. Most of the film unfolds just a few miles from the Führer’s birthplace, in the Austrian hillside village of St Radegund. It’s here that Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), now famous as a conscientious objector but unknown throughout his life, settled on his family’s farm with his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner) and three daughters, until the draft came, coercing him into military training, and driving him to grapple with the contradictions between his Catholic faith and obligations to his fatherland.
Jägerstätter’s story is almost brutally simple in outline, but Malick’s patient method wants to delve into his soul. His famously filigreed shot-making works to show us this farm, this family, their rituals, and their gradual rift with the community. St Radegund has a ranting mayor (Karl Markovics) who holds court at the tavern, spouting his agreement with Nazi racial policy.
Jägerstätter quietly agrees to disagree, but faces indignation and insult before long. The parish church, where he works as a sacristan, can offer him no lasting protection, and his petitions to a bishop yield the party line that God and fatherland are to be jointly served. This is even as church bells are melted down into bullets and priests sent to concentration camps for opposing the regime.
No one looks up for answers like Malick. Jörg Widmer’s camera directs our gaze through the odd tree canopy, sure, and at the vaulted ceilings of churches, libraries, barns. At waist height, the pews are always empty. And Franz is often quite isolated.
Diehl, the German star best known as an SS officer in Inglourious Basterds, is this film’s humble servant. It’s a sober, truthful, portrait that holds something back. Avoiding conflict for as long as he can, he’s an unpretentious martyr – Jägerstätter was in fact beatified by the Catholic Church in 2007 – who refuses to judge his inquisitors.
Fani, meanwhile, is by far the strongest female role and performance Malick has captured since the Seventies. The expressive Valerie Pachner gives her a loving pugnacity that dovetails marvellously with Diehl’s work, and their final scene together is unhistrionically shattering.
When Franz leaves for the last time, he and Fani cross the Salzach River that’s Franz’s personal Rubicon, as he girds himself to declare his silent, solo war on Hitler. Malick’s tribute goes out to an utterly non-performative protest lodged against state power, the kind of needless sacrifice or “unhistoric act” that imperceptibly advances the good of the world. And what a comeback it has inspired.
A Hidden Life’s release date in the UK is yet to be confirmed