![]() (His response of “Pfui Hitler” gets him into trouble.) Then, in 1943, he is asked to report to the barracks for active duty that’s when he refuses to swear the oath to Hitler. Returning home, Franz worries about the possibility of being called to active duty he refuses to say “Heil Hitler” to passersby. Meanwhile, the village’s committed Nazi mayor (Karl Markovics) drunkenly rails against “outsiders” and “immigrants”-but did he and his hatreds suddenly come from nowhere? Austrian politics throughout the nineteen-thirties were turbulent, and the Anschluss happened in 1938, yet it seems that politics didn’t penetrate the village’s rustic fabric until the draft snapped up Franz, in 1940-and, even then, he takes his conscription and training as a sort of summer-camp game (though he is conspicuously alone among recruits in not applauding a newsreel of German military victories). The first sign of trouble, ludicrously, is the sound of an airplane overhead, which makes Fani tilt her head upward in bewilderment. Their village is a hermetic, apolitical, and utterly pre-modern agrarian paradise. The townspeople appear to have been living like Rousseauian innocents, in a state of natural nobility tinged by a golden drop of Catholicism-happy, safe, and holy. ![]() It’s as if politics and its cultural and local correlates had never existed in Austria. This historical footage overwhelms the entire movie, turning the dramatization into a virtual puppet show.įranz and Fani are seen romping through the fields of Radegund, like blissfully ignorant children, until the lightning bolt of the military draft strikes their household, in 1940, two years after the Anschluss and seven years after Hitler came to power. For that matter, clips from home movies of Hitler appear, appallingly, as part of a dream sequence, but they seem tossed in, mainly serving as a reminder of Hitler’s ubiquity at the time. These clips present both a mystery and an authenticity that nothing in the rest of the film can match. The movie includes heavily edited illustrative clips from newsreel footage, showing the destruction of the Second World War, Hitler giving speeches, and Nazi rallies. Meanwhile, his outsider status-as other men in the village have gone off to fight and die-leads to Fani and their children being ostracized, apart from the secret support of a few friends who share Franz’s sympathies but not his resolve or courage. He shows up for military duty grudgingly but refuses to swear the oath, claiming conscientious-objector status, and is consequently arrested and imprisoned. He thinks that Germany is waging an unjust war, and he doesn’t like Hitler. ![]() Franz doesn’t believe in the Nazi cause or agree with its racial hatreds. In 1940, he’s conscripted into the Army-at a time when Austrian soldiers, in the wake of the Anschluss, were forced to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler. It’s based on the true story of Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), an Austrian farmer living peacefully in the rustic farm village of Radegund with his wife, Fani (Valerie Pachner), their three young daughters, her sister (Maria Simon), and his mother (Karin Neuhäuser). It’s painful to discover that “A Hidden Life” is as aridly theoretical and impersonal as its bare-bones description suggests. Even so, I walked into “A Hidden Life” buoyed by confidence in the impulses and intuitions of such a great director. He has spent plenty of time in Texas, France, and Hollywood, but he has, of course, never been to Nazi Germany. Malick’s recent string of glories focusses on places that he knows well and at first hand. Yet, when I heard that the subject of Malick’s new film, “A Hidden Life,” would be the story of an Austrian soldier who refuses to fight on behalf of Nazi Germany, I worried. He is, moreover, one of the few filmmakers-ever-to realize a style that matches such a transcendent goal. The run of movies that he’s made in the past ten years-“ The Tree of Life,” “ To the Wonder,” “ Knight of Cups,” and “ Song to Song”-is, in effect, a single movie, ranging over the places and experiences of his life and linking them to a grand metaphysical design. ![]() I didn’t put any of Terrence Malick’s films on my list of the best movies of the decade, but I did mention him as one of the decade’s best directors. ![]()
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