He details the training at a nearby ancient fortress in long, loving letters home. They’re too consumed with each other, their little girls and their work to pay it much mind.
He’s “broken our chains” “lifted the people” and made Austria great again.įranz and Fani pay little mind to the beer-swilling pundits of village green. And Austrians, especially the village mayor ( Karl Markovics), are thrilled. Hitler, we remember, has annexed his native Austria into the German Reich. Malick presents Radegund as a quiet pastoral idyll, living in harmony with nature, all but untouched by the modern world.īut it’s 1939. They plow and plant, care for the cows, chickens and pigs, scythe the wheat in late summer and haul it to the waterwheel grist mill with their donkey. It’s a gorgeous place, a world peopled by those content with lives of physical labor ruled only by the demands of each changing season. And it’s a love story, an all-consuming romance that cannot withstand the test that this moral choice forces Franz Jägerstätter to make.įranz, played by August Diehl of “The Command” and “Allied” and “Inglourious Basterds,” is an Alpine farmer who, with his wife Fani ( Valerie Pachner) has made a life in in their village, Radegund. It’s a World War II allegory for our times, a lone Austrian refusing to “go along,” to “Heil Hitler” even though every Austrian around him insists on it. This dream fugue of a movie is three hour meditation on the bravery of conscientously objecting to the actions of one’s government and refusing to swear fealty to a leader when to do so would be a betrayal of yourself and your morality. Breathtakingly beautiful, poetic, soulful and chillingly topical, Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Place” searches for righteousness in a time when cruelty and evil are the popular will.
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