“A Hidden Life”, by Terrence Malick: our review

LOpinions are divided

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True story: in the Austrian Tyrol, at the start of the Second World War, Franz, a peasant and father, expresses his rejection of Hitler. A minority, he is increasingly ostracized by local residents. Nothing helps, the man will always refuse to swear loyalty to the Führer. Isn’t this suicide?

The substance is cruel: Terrence Malick does not avoid the violence, the beatings endured in prison by the refractory. But the form is that of a gentle chanting, eminently musical (supported by Bach, Handel, Dvorák, etc.). Where the infinitely great, the sky, what is beyond us, combines with life within reach – and first of all the face of Fani, Franz’s beloved wife. It is therefore towards light and a form of spiritual elevation, not despair, that this work, however disastrous, tends, a eulogy of extreme commitment. That of a solitary resistance fighter defending his moral conscience and his freedom to the end, without noise, without shouting, without even trying to one day be heard… But, today, the film makes this stranger a symbol of heroism absolute. —Jacques Morice

Against

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In the tragedy of Nazism, the filmmaker seems to have found only a “decor” for the beatification of his hero. With this emphatic, stuttering staging, each family gesture takes the ritualized time of prayer. The characters become figurines stuck on a pastoral poster background. A hidden life is not, as its title indicates, the chronicle of a quiet resistance, but a heavy advertising symphony for martyrdom and paradise lost. —Guillemette Odicino