![]() Franz, whose father died on the losing and less dignified side of World War I, doesn’t respond well to that idea. News travels about Hitler’s advancements, as does the fact that every able-bodied Austrian man will be forced to sign an oath pledging their allegiance to the fuhrer. It drifts up the hill like a pestilence that only he can see. It’s all so beautiful that Franz - quiet, stoic, more of a vessel than a man, and generally emblematic of how the simplicity of these farmer characters suits Malick’s emotional detachment - has to alert us to a disturbance in the force. Here, however, Malick slows his unmoored style to emphasize serenity, and punctuates the film with an array of static shots that are almost Herzogian in how they capture the indifference of the green mountains and the gentle mist that floats between them. The natural lighting brings a rustic hue to everything it touches, while the lush camerawork is often as restless and anecdotal as it was in “The Tree of Life,” running towards the actors like an eager child and looking up at the adults with a sense of worship. Widmer, who worked as a camera operator on five of Malick’s previous films, steps into the role without rocking the boat - if anything, he steadies it. One striking difference here is the absence of Malick’s regular cinematographer/enabler, Emmanuel Lubezki, who’s been replaced here by Joerg Widmer. Imagine the childhood sequences from “The Tree of Life” transposed into pre-war Europe, and you’ll have a decent idea of how the first hour of Malick’s new film unfold. ![]() We see the representative images of Malick’s ideal life, complete with all the usual running and playing and frolicking in the fields. The year is 1939, but that information doesn’t seem to be especially relevant for Franz Jägerstätter (August Dielh) and his wife Fani ( Valerie Pachner), a farming couple whose simple life is limited to their crops, their daughters, and the tight-knit community who gathers in the local pub each Saturday night and the local church each Sunday morning. Radegund, a postcard-perfect village that’s located above the clouds and the storm that’s brewing in the world below. ![]() The film begins in the idyllic valleys of Austria’s St. “A Hidden Life” Reiner BajoĪnd “A Hidden Life” provides a linear narrative, albeit one that’s interrupted like a jammed radio signal, and characteristically assembled from the bits that other period epics might cut. The virtue of a coherent plot may be a bit overstated these days, particularly in an indie community that likes to stress how “everyone has a story to tell,” but Malick is in dire need of the bumper lanes that a linear narrative provides. An opening title card boasts that “The following story is inspired by real events,” and just like that, Malick makes his audience a promise that he intends to keep: This movie will have a story. Devout Catholics, they refuse to support the Nazi regime in the wake of the Anschluss in 1938, and when Frantz is conscripted he takes a stand as a conscientious objector, refusing to swear his allegiance to Hitler, a decision which will test the limits of his beliefs.Īn intimate epic, A Hidden Life sees Malick revisit themes of faith versus religion, personal responsibility, and the destruction of an Edenic paradise.Providing a soulful and occasionally sublime middle ground between Malick’s two eras, “A Hidden Life” is only a few seconds old before it announces itself as a kind of return to form. Radegund, a sublimely beautiful Austrian mountain village. Frantz (August Diehl) is introduced tending to the land with his wife, Fani (Valerie Pachner), high on the slopes of St. Having pondered questions of contemporary spiritual malaise in Knight of Cups and Song to Song, Terrence Malick is on a surer footing with the true story of Frantz Jägerstätter, a man of faith who pays dearly for his convictions when Nazi ideology sweeps through Europe. This film was released on 17th January 2020, and is no longer screening.
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