The Zone of Interest

 

Director Jonathan Glazer

Glazer receiving his prize at Cannes

Glazer with Łukasz Żal

British novelist Martin Amis

THE ZONE OF INTEREST              B                                                                                      Great Britain  USA  Poland  (105 mi)  2023  d: Jonathan Glazer

Sunbeams, radiant and warm, human bodies, young and old, and who are imprisoned here, our hearts are yet not cold.  We who are imprisoned here, are wakeful as the stars at night, souls afire, like the blazing sun, tearing, breaking through their pain, for soon we’ll see that waving flag, the flag of freedom yet to come.                                                                                           —Read aloud while the piano plays Auschwitz prisoner Joseph Wulf’s composition Sunbeams

Making films about the Holocaust is a genre in itself, producing a large sample size of films, where Claude Lanzmann’s epic SHOAH (1985) is arguably the best and most impactful, required viewing for each successive generation, yet other notable contenders are Alain Resnais’ NIGHT AND FOG (1956), Jan Nĕmec’s Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci) (1964), Louis Malle’s AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS (1987), Roman Polanski’s THE PIANIST (2002), Tim Blake Nelson’s THE GREY ZONE (2002), Malte Ludin’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him (2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß) (2005), Cate Shortland’s Lore (2012), Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2014 Top Ten List #2 Ida (2013), Christian Petzold’s 2015 Top Ten List # 3 Phoenix (2014), and László Nemes’ Son of Saul (Saul Fia) (2015), to name a few, though Spielberg’s SCHINDLER’S LIST (1993) may be the most popular and most watched.  In his first non-English language film, this feels more like a spiritual sequel to the chilly austerity of Michael Haneke’s formally precise The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte) (2009), as the cruelty on display is overwhelming, told with a detached, observational point of view, where the privileged elite have a despicable superiority complex where they routinely order others around in a long-standing practice of servitude, taking great pleasure in causing others to suffer, motivated primarily by greed and self-interest, paying little mind to any existing humanity, viewing outsiders only for their ability to serve the master race.  Certainly one eye-opening aspect is the role German women play in the Führer’s Final Solution, where the Nazi machinery of human extermination was a murderous practice designed to remove all witnesses to the crimes of the SS, yet what they envision is a utopian world that amounts to an Aryan paradise on earth, living the dream of the Third Reich, having expanded east into Poland, claiming it’s their birthright, seeing themselves as a chosen few, an all-powerful ruling class, having the best of all things, completely indifferent to the inhumane suffering that others routinely suffer for their benefit, where a life of extreme privilege is all that matters, no matter the cost.  One of their absurdly ridiculous bourgeois concerns is having the clean linens hanging from the lines protected from the stain of a continuous stream of crematorium ash falling from the sky, like washing the blood off their hands, where no amount of cleaning can prevent the scourge of death, or ignore the foul stench of burning bodies that contaminated the entire community, as the sins of the old are quite literally infecting the next generation of the young, as even the children learn to ignore the atrocities by not looking out the window.  One striking realization is the complete absence of love in their lives, where they express love to animals, their dogs or their horses, but not to each other.  From the maker of SEXY BEAST (2000), BIRTH (2004), and Under the Skin (2013), after having gotten his start making commercials and music videos, this film won the Grand Prize (2nd Place) at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, where it received a six-minute standing ovation, a very freely inspired adaptation of the 2014 Martin Amis historical fiction novel, where the film is dedicated to him, as he died the same day the film premiered at Cannes.  Glazer’s films often involve worlds disrupted by unexpected visitors, like a psychopathic criminal colleague arriving at the door in SEXY BEAST, a ten year old boy proclaiming he is the reincarnation of the bride-to-be’s deceased husband in BIRTH, or an alien’s callous view of the human race in Under the Skin (2013), while he’s also played around with the element of empathy in fascinating and unusual ways.  This film is inhabited by the ghosts of the dead, immersed in a world of complacency, where an immense estate with gardens and flowers and even a swimming pool rests on the nightmares of the Holocaust, situated alongside a giant wall of the neighboring Auschwitz concentration camp surrounded by barbed wire, where just over the horizon there are constant sounds of arriving trains, with clouds of puffing smoke seen moving just over the rooftops, while muffled screams can be heard, and barking dogs, with angry military orders and shots fired (Oscar nominated sound design by Johnnie Burn), but only the fuming chimney smoke reveals the horrific atrocities that occur there, where an estimated 1.1 million were gassed and incinerated in the Auschwitz crematoriums, which are completely ignored by this influential Nazi family.  They’re not turning a blind eye to mass murder, they’re planning and implementing it, as the banal routines of their lives become the central focus, leaving the rest to the imagination of the viewers.  There is an intentional absence of drama in Glazer’s screenplay, as nothing much happens beyond what we know is happening offscreen, yet viewers are immersed into the ordinary rhythms of their lives, where they simply become numb to the deaths happening just outside their doorstep, yet there is no moralizing or rendered judgement here, but it’s suffocating just the same, as an unseen stench permeates every frame of this film.

The silence and closed walls of a theater make the viewing experience so much more impactful, as this is as much an auditory experience as a visual undertaking, with Glazer skirting the boundaries of what’s really happening by obscuring the routine killings of an extermination camp, keeping those horrors at a distance, and focusing instead on the normalcy of life taking place in that beautifully constructed mirage next door, with a spacious house with perfectly manicured landscaping, an idyllic place of bucolic peace and contentment, where the utter indifference on display is highly disturbing.  Much like Scorsese’s portrait of Native-American genocide in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), this film explores the horror of the Holocaust not by focusing on the millions of victims, but by singularly showing the perspective of the perpetrators.  Christian Friedel, the schoolteacher in The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte), is Rudolf Höss, the longest serving Nazi SS Auschwitz commandant who runs the camp from his nearby family residence, leading a quiet life in a luxurious villa that he leaves every morning to go to work, spending much of his time dictating reports by phone, basically married to his job, overseeing the arrival of the prisoners to their elimination, living with his Lady Macbeth wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), displaying pride and disgust in equal parts, with occasional bouts of histrionics, deemed the Queen of Auschwitz, their five children, the oldest already part of The Hitler Youth, and beloved family dog (Hüller’s own dog, a Weimaraner mix), all living in domestic bliss.  It is a ghoulish study of what Hannah Arendt described as “the banality of evil” in her 1963 exposé on Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, where her assertion is that history’s greatest evils, instead of being carried out by fanatics or sociopaths, were instead done by bureaucrats and ordinary people who accepted the heinous practices of a murderous national state as “normal,” suggesting evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.  Höss and his family go on outdoor picnics in the nearby forest, swim and fish in the streams, and entertain guests in their vast backyard gardens while tucking their kids into bed at night reading them bedtime stories, making sure all the house lights are turned off and the doors locked.  His position offers them a luxurious life, one they often dreamed of, believing this is the reward for carrying out Hitler’s Final Solution, planned in meticulous detail by Nazi officials, including Höss, who was instrumental, earning the admiration of Hitler and other Nazi leaders because of his innovative and efficient methods of murdering Jews, exuding an almost giddy pleasure in his success, where it would be impossible to entertain any idea that the family was unaware of the crimes committed in the name of the Nazi empire, as they were all complicit in achieving that heinous goal, believing it would help them reach that dream of establishing a German oasis.  At one point, a Jewish woman is brought from the camp to Höss’s office for his sexual pleasure, another aspect of the systematic dehumanization.  Hedwig fully understands her role as she sadistically oversees the daily chores of a silent cadre of terrorized camp prisoners as gardeners, housekeepers, and cooks with an iron fist, a bone-chilling display of brute power, occasionally threatening to have them sent to the other side of the wall if they don’t exactly comply with her wishes, while taking what she pleases from the stockpile of Jewish clothes, furs, jewels, and cosmetics left behind in the camp, even asking her husband for specific colors of clothing, while at the same time complaining about how Jewish women were so terribly thin.  In lockstep with the times, perhaps it’s not surprising to learn that every week she sends Hitler a bouquet of flowers from her gardens.  Edited with cold precision and punctuated with an ominous score by Mica Levi, an abstract mix of organs, synthesizers, and voices, while shot from multiple angles with fixed, remote-controlled cameras by Polish cinematographer Łukasz Żal, who was Oscar nominated for Pawel Pawlikowski’s beautifully crisp black and white 2014 Top Ten List #2 Ida and Cold War (Zimna wojna) (2018).  There’s a center-focused, Kubrickian symmetry to every shot, which is geometric in its staging, expressed with almost suffocating perfection, given an antiseptic, clinical feel, where much like Kubrick, Glazer is utterly obsessive in his approach to filmmaking, which is all-consuming, as we are immersed into the lives of a family that shows no signs of any sort of moral compass, exhibiting indifference in the face of atrocities, where the harrowing portrait of normalcy in their lives is frightfully chilling, as they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, fully invested in carrying out the Führer’s vision of a master race, where the illusory nature of power leads to such a widescale murder of millions, plunging us into the landscape of death and depravity from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  While Glazer does humanize the Höss family, as Shakespeare does Macbeth, but in no way are they portrayed sympathetically, instead the vile nature of their horrific deeds is viewed as a deeply entrenched aspect of the human condition, where it’s not so much about examining Nazi ideology as exploring the human capacity for violence, and how much suffering we are willing to ignore, unleashing the murder of innocents on a scale we’ve never seen, at one point reaching a peak of 2000 lives per hour.    

The human mediocrity on display comprising the large majority of this film stands in stark contrast to the efficiency of mass murder happening just outside our vantage point, with Glazer, who grew up on the northern outskirts of London as part of a thriving Jewish community, showing a fascination with the benign routines of ordinary life, suggesting this was German life during the Holocaust, business as usual, no one in the least bit disturbed, but in doing so, despite the skillful portrayal, the victims are barely referenced, and in fact are avoided, a calculation that feels misguided, for instance it leaves out the Sonderkommando who were so prevalent in THE GREY ZONE and Son of Saul (Saul Fia), as victims throughout time have been largely negated and overlooked.  Whatever Glazer’s intentions, there’s a vacuous emptiness to the artful austerity of the film that undermines any real connection with viewers, who may be in awe of the film aesthetic, but they’re not emotionally invested.  The clinically detached design of the film stays one note and never evolves, described by director and screenwriter Paul Schrader as a parlour trick, feeling overly restrictive and overly reliant on a Reality TV-style immersion into the lives of vile characters that you can’t get away from fast enough, whose emotionally distant lives are filmed as if they are under constant surveillance.  Court psychologist Gustave M. Gilbert described Höss as objective and numb during the Nuremberg trials, where he was hung in 1947 just yards away from his Auschwitz family estate, the last ever public execution in Poland.  The film was actually shot in Poland, where the final credits are a stream of Polish names, with Glazer collaborating with the Auschwitz Museum and other organizations, provided access to the archives, and some of the meticulous historical detail is impressive, where he read the testimonies provided by survivors and individuals who had been employed in the Höss household, including photographs, none of which show the camp looming in the background, a sprawling complex comprised of 15 square miles, as they intentionally avoided that angle, but the film corrects that omission, as it’s an unavoidable reality.  At one point Hedwig’s mother (Imogen Kogge) arrives and is proudly shown around the grounds of the garden, given a room upstairs, where she’s haunted by the nearby sounds and the burning night sky, but no one utters a word about it, evoking a deafening silence, until eventually she leaves without a word, though she leaves a handwritten note that her daughter angrily destroys.  After a scene in which Höss reads the chillingly similar Grimm’s fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel to his children (where an ill-intentioned witch is burned alive in her own oven), the film cuts to a completely different look, a black and white thermal-photography sequence of a young girl secretly walking out into the night, resembling a dream sequence, but gradually the format shifts to standard color photography, where viewers realize she’s not only real, but an essential component of the storyline based upon Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, Aleksandra Kołodziejczyk (Julia Polaczek), a local Polish girl who was part of the underground Polish resistance (The Polish Underground Home Army (AK) and the Jews) who secretly left food and medicine for the prisoners in construction sites at night, given a surreal flourish as she’s seen leaving apples, suggesting empathy does exist even in this hellish inferno.  As it turns out, she’s wearing the same dress and bicycle that belonged to her, artifacts that are part of the Auschwitz Museum.  We also see her playing a real piece of music on the piano, a Yiddish song Sunbeams that she discovered curled up in a tin written by Auschwitz prisoner Joseph Wulf who survived the camps to become a Jewish historian, but committed suicide, writing about his frustrations in his last letter to his son, “I have published 18 books about the Third Reich, and they have had no effect.  You can document everything to death for the Germans.  Yet the mass murderers walk around free, live in their little houses, and grow flowers.”  In another dramatic turn, Höss is transferred to a different locale closer to Berlin as supervisor to all the camp commandants, but Hedwig is infuriated and refuses to move, firmly rooted in a place where she feels invested, where living a pampered existence takes precedence over his promotion, even if that means living without him.  The place that was hell on earth for those imprisoned in the camp is viewed as paradise on earth for Hedwig Höss.  In a pivotal scene where she confronts her husband, Hedwig is seen walking at a brisk pace alongside the camp walls (which have now been overgrown by giant trees), using visual effects to simulate exactly as it would have looked in 1943, where the barracks and watchtower remain exactly as they are.  In a stunning final sequence, Höss is at Party headquarters for a formal dress ball, attending alone, where in one moment he takes in the gravity of the boldly dramatic architecture design glorifying the Nazi Party, later seen alone on an empty stairway, where we see him peering down darkened corridors in a shrewdly calculated flash-forward to a present day cleaning crew on the grounds of the Auschwitz Museum, where they silently do their work, while in the background are glass enclosures with Jewish artifacts left behind, all that remains from the dead, a powerful image where the immense silence through the passage of time imposes its own will on viewers.      

Son of Saul (Saul Fia)

SON OF SAUL (Saul Fia)         B+             
Hungary  (107 mi)  2015  d:  László Nemes 

Since then, at an uncertain hour,

That agony returns,

And till my ghastly tale is told,

This heart within me burns.

—The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798

A protégé of Béla Tarr, working as his assistant director on THE MAN FROM LONDON (2007), László Nemes in his premiere feature was the winner of the Grand Prix (2nd place), FIPRESCI, and François Chalais (Best Journalism) awards at Cannes with one of the most praised films in competition, finding a new and unique way to tell the story of the Holocaust, opening in a blur, where a character gets closer and walks into the focus of the frame, holding that individual steadily in focus and following him for the remainder of the film, as everything seen is presented from his point of view.  Shot by Mátyás Erdély, much of it in long takes, creating a strange, almost dreamlike effect, where everything around him remains in a blur, always out of focus, a technique that initially grabs the viewer’s attention, but becomes repetitive, perhaps even monotonous after awhile, and may not hold up for the duration of the picture.  Also winning the Vulcan award for technical achievement was Tamás Zányi, creating one of the most remarkable sound designs in cinema history, a relentlessly brutal depiction of the Holocaust as presented through background noises, where threatening Nazi commands are continually barked out, usually accompanied by the sounds of shovings, beatings, screams, machine gun fire, and ferocious dogs barking, a non-stop offensive barrage that becomes the most astonishing aspect of the film, especially considering viewers can only partially see what’s happening on the peripheral of the frame, yet remain intensely glued to the screen.  Géza Röhrig plays Saul Auslӓnder, a beleaguered Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz that is part of a Hungarian team of Sonderkommandos whose death sentences have been temporarily reprieved, offered special privileges, used by the Nazi’s to help herd each new arrival of Jews transported by trains into the gas chambers, helping provide reassurance that they were heading for showers instead of their instant deaths, then clearing out the bodies for burning or burial, cutting hair, extracting gold from their teeth, removing the clothes and personal belongings, basically doing the dirty work in order to maintain the efficiency this system of mass extermination requires.  After a period of about 3 or 4 months, the Sonderkommandos are themselves executed, replaced by the formation of new teams whose ghastly first job assignment is clearing the bodies of the previous group of Sonderkommandos.  In this way, if all goes according to plan, there will be no surviving Jewish witnesses to the Holocaust. 

Without ever showing the graphic horrors that might be impossible to restage, this film instead recreates what it sounds like, where teams of Jewish workers are continually worked to the point of mental and physical exhaustion, where they are under no illusion what awaits them.  However, the longer they are kept alive, fully aware of how the camps operate, the larger their threat becomes in exposing to the world just what the Nazi’s are up to, as the extent of deaths from these extermination camps was not revealed until “after” the war was over.  Always under the gun of the Nazi’s, the daily grind of living among the constant stench of such massive human slaughter becomes psychologically numbing.  By shooting the film in this way, holding the camera fixed on Saul’s anguished face, shot in a boxed, 1:37 aspect ratio, it literally takes us inside his head, accentuating the pressures of his psychological torment, where the film is largely a window into his distraught state of mind, forced to completely shut out the outside world, where he is considered a walking casualty among the dead, where there is little to distinguish between the living and the dead.  The onslaught of Nazi hatred and contempt is the same, where individuals are routinely ridiculed and shot on the spot for not following orders quickly enough.  The attempt to get under the surface is an altogether different one, using virtuoso experimental techniques to express the incomprehensible, as no one could fully grasp the totality of the death camp experience.  The extreme degree of horror of the death camps affects everyone differently, where the director is attempting to recreate the intensity of experiencing that horror by vividly personalizing it through one man’s ordeal.  Some may find that attempt distasteful, exploiting the memory of the dead through harrowing “action” sequences, actually borrowing techniques from conventional action thrillers mixed in with the experimentation.  But it’s important to consider the Holocaust created exceptional circumstances where a different set of rules applies to anything remotely defined as “human” understanding.  Hatred and an utter contempt for human life contribute to a collective demoralization the likes of which the human condition had never seen, where figuring into the making of every decision is an agonizing fear and the constant threat of death.  Who are we to question the acts or the mindset of anyone having to live through this unimaginable trauma? 

The film inhabits what Auschwitz survivor and author Primo Levi called “The Gray Zone” in his memoir collection of essays from his 1986 book The Drowned and the Saved, and recalls Tim Blake Nelson’s extraordinary play turned into a feature-length film, THE GREY ZONE (2002), which was also based on Levi’s essays and similarly featured the plight of a group of Sonderkommandos, but also included the documented, true life experiences of Dr. Nyiszli, a Jewish doctor who was ordered by Nazi SS Officer and physician Josef Mengele to perform certain nefarious medical experiments due to his high expertise, who survived Auschwitz and lived to reveal what happened inside the death camps.  In both films, the story turns on the discovery of a miraculous child survivor from the gassings, perhaps buried underneath the dead bodies where air pockets remain uncontaminated, which turns into an obsession to save the life of the child, even if it endangers a planned uprising that could save thousands.  In this film, the Nazi’s brutally kill the child that Saul comes to believe is his own, which is the subject of some dispute, but may have been an illegitimate child he neglected while he was alive, spending the duration of the film desperately seeking to find a rabbi among the harrowing confusion of the camps, putting his own life at risk at least a dozen times as he becomes unhinged, obsessed with the all-but-impossible task of giving the child a proper Jewish burial where a rabbi can perform the kaddish.  Similarly, there is also a secretly planned Jewish rebellion, inspired by the actual events of an October 7, 1944 uprising at Auschwitz (The Revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau | Jewish Virtual Library), where a unit of Sonderkommandos was largely made up of Hungarian Jews, becoming a last ditch effort that might impact upon their otherwise all-too-certain fates, while also hoping to smuggle photos of the crematoriums to the outside world. Throughout this ordeal, Saul is chastised by his fellow prisoners for not pulling his weight, for neglecting their cause, claiming “You’ve abandoned the living for the sake of the dead.”  This is largely the moral dilemma of Saul, who at least for a brief period rediscovers within himself the stirrings of life, even while totally surrounded by a system of enveloping madness and death.  For whatever reason, the director decides the release the claustrophobic vantage point, expanding the field of vision near the end with questionable results, but in doing so implicates the neighbors and surrounding community that witnessed the mass starvation, constant shootings, and the burning of human flesh in crematoriums built exclusively for that purpose, while remaining silent.