AFI Fest: From Queen & Slim to Babyteeth, to Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Female Moviemakers Took the Lead

A Hidden Life

At three hours long, A Hidden Life—about an Austrian conscientious objector who refused to fight for the Nazis in World War II—is an achingly sad, brutal, repetitive, and stunningly gorgeous tribute to a pebble lost in the river of time.

Like all of Malick’s works, A Hidden Life is a strikingly elemental film, in which nature dominates over all. Water carves its way through the countryside, wind whistles through the fields of wheat, and the mountain peaks rise like cathedrals over our main characters’ village. The toils and agonies of the human race are but a speck in the vast expanses of the land around us. Franz, the central character, is so dogmatic that he cannot see any path but the one he has set for himself.

In many ways, this film feels like a companion to Martin Scorsese’s Silence. In that film, pride is the death of nuance. For Scorsese, the arrogance of faith lies in the inability to know what an action truly means, and how that operates in tandem with belief. For Malick, however, pride is not necessarily a source of fear and suffering.

Also Read: A Hidden Life Star Valerie Pachner on Making Soup With Terrence Malick

When pushed against about why he is being so defiant, Franz (August Diehl) is told, “You can’t change the world. The world is stronger.” Through his journey, there are no easy answers, just the overwhelming sense that everything in the world has its place—the suffering and the quiet acts of noble dignity. By the final moments of A Hidden Life, it’s difficult not to sense a harmony between all forces, between the rain falling from the clouds and the violence wrought by one group upon another, between the sowing of the fields and the tender embrace of man and wife. —Ryan Williams

AFI Fest 2019 presented by Audi ran Nov. 14 – 21.

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