Reiner Bajo
August Diehl and Valerie Pachner in 'A Hidden Life.'
Franz, the protagonist of A Hidden Life, is first heard in a voice-over against a dark screen. Like a German Romantic poet, he speaks of building a nest way up high—a place of fulfillment above the clouds. And then come A Hidden Life’s first images: black and white footage from an airplane casting a shadow over a European city. Film buffs will recognize the plane as Hitler’s and the footage from director Leni Riefenstahl’s beautifully-crafted adulation of Hitler, Triumph of the Will. The nest above the clouds could also refer to the earlier work of Riefenstahl, whose fame was based on her mountain-climbing movies of the 1920s.
In happier days, Franz (August Diehl) and his wife Franziska (Valerie Pachner) live above the clouds, literally as well as in love. They farm verdant sloping fields in Upper Austria overlooked by the Alps. Their close-knit village of wood and fieldstone dwellings surrounded by swarming geese and squawking pigs had changed little in centuries, yet upheaval is just above the horizon. A Hidden Life begins in 1939, Austria was annexed the year before by Nazi Germany and World War II is about to begin.
A Hidden Life is written and directed by Terence Malick (Days of Heaven) and is a more conventional narrative than his recent films such as Tree of Life and To the Wonder. However, A Hidden Life isn’t Hollywood conventional. The story it tells of conscientious objection under the Nazis is elliptical with brief flashbacks and daydreams. A Hidden Life moves elegantly between here and there, now and then, brutality and prayer, spirituality and doubt.
At three hours in length, A Hidden Life examines Franz’s life, death and the issues they raise with unhurried care and cinematic beauty. The long tracking shot down the unending piss-colored corridor of the prison where Franz is confined becomes—like Riefenstahl’s depiction of Hitler—a thing of darkly perverse beauty.
Malick took the story from real life. Franz Jägerstätter was something of a hellion in his youth (the film hints at this) but underwent an intense identification with Roman Catholic spirituality under the influence of his wife. The twists and turns of Jägerstätter’s journey from motorcycle-riding wild man to the execution block were more complicated than shown but a fuller treatment under Malick’s meticulous hands might have ended in a four-hour film. In 2007 Jägerstätter was belatedly honored by the Catholic Church and beatified as a martyr.
As summarized in A Hidden Life, Franz is drafted when Germany goes to war and enjoys the horseplay with his comrades in between marching and bayonet drill. It’s unclear why he begins to reconsider his apparent acceptance of the Nazi regime (in real life, he seems to have already registered complaints by this time). Malick abruptly shows Franz’s souring mood as the only member of his platoon who doesn’t applaud a newsreel celebrating the destructive force of the German military.
Franz is demobilized after Germany’s rapid string of victories in the spring of 1940. At that point, he’s more valuable on the farm than on the front. But as the war drags on and German defeat of the Allies grows more elusive, the threat of being recalled to the army darkens his life in the village. Franz becomes the Bartleby of his town, preferring not to donate to the wounded veterans fund and walking away as the mayor makes a speech denouncing foreigners and immigrants.
Franz decides that if recalled, we will refuse to swear the oath to Hitler expected of all German soldiers (but didn’t he already take the oath the first time he was drafted?). He turns to his priest who speaks guardedly and sends him to the bishop. Franz asks the prelate, “If God gave us free will, we are responsible for what we do… If our leaders are evil, what do we do?” The worried bishop—afraid Franz might be a Gestapo spy—replies, “You have a duty to the Fatherland. The Church tells you so.”
Malick is almost as transfixed by the lay of the land as the ideas he puts forth. A Hidden Life’s narrative pauses often to ponder the beauty of Austria’s alpine foothills and the Baroque splendor of its Catholic churches. The film is a feast for the eyes as well as the intellect in its panorama of the human condition. Most of the villagers go along with the Nazis and ostracize Franz and Franziska as their nonconformity becomes more apparent. The village kids join in, pelting Franz’s daughters with mud. Only a few locals whisper to Franz that Hitler is the anti-Christ, a pronouncement the increasingly hard-pressed Catholic Church is afraid to make.
A Hidden Life clearly sides with Franz but an alternative course is put forth by his priest, his court-appointed attorney and even—behind closed doors in chambers—his judge. Franz can be reassigned to medical duty—just sign the damn oath because refusing will change nothing and result only in his execution and problems for his family. Although it goes unmentioned by the screenplay, Franz’s stance is in contrast to Germans of various political persuasions who braved death by actively working against the regime as opposed to his passive resistance. The words of that oath mean everything to Franz. He refuses to speak them.
Speaking of words, Malick made the curious choice of writing parts of the dialogue in English and others in German left without subtitles. Knowledge of that language can’t help but increase appreciation for the film’s many layers of meaning. How else could you recognize that the murmuring on the way to the executioner is the Lord’s Prayer?
