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.      

The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte)

THE WHITE RIBBON (Das Weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte)     B+      

aka:  The White Ribbon – A German Children’s Story

France  Germany  Austria  Italy  (145 mi)  2009  d:  Michael Haneke

Among the themes in the German culture that have been identified as conducive to the emergence of the Nazi dictatorship are the following: a submissive, authoritarian culture; an anti-intellectual and antirational romanticism; what has been called Volkishness -- a combination of anti-intellectual romanticism and a distorted form of populism and xenophobia; an exaggerated form of nationalism with a corresponding rejection of internationalism; a glorification of war and martial values; a hostility to the West and modernism and their values; and a deeply rooted hostility to the Jews.

Several scholars conducted immediate postwar studies whose data indicate a strong strain of authoritarianism in the German familly and in other social relations, such as those between teacher and student, employer and employee, and even husband and wife. Related to this is the finding of the classic Civic Culture study that, compared to the citizens of the Anglo-American democracies, citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany felt less competent to participate effectively in political activity.

—Lawrence Mayer, Comparative Politics: Nations and Theories in a Changing World, December 2000  

 

Winner of the Palme d’Or (1st prize) at Cannes, beating out the likes of Jacques Audiard’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #10 A Prophet (Un Prophète), which won the Grand Prix (2nd prize), the general feeling is that this is not like anything else Haneke has ever done, as it doesn’t have the punishing individual guilt associated with his other works and it brings children more prominently into the foreground, though it certainly examines the skeletons in the closet of the human race as if trying to peer into our Darwinian roots of evil, described by Haneke as “the origin of every type of terrorism, be it of political or religious nature.”  While Caché (Hidden) (2005) plays upon the collective guilt of a nation, using the present to comment upon racial injustices of the past, here he conjures up the past to reflect upon a country’s impending future, which is another way at taking a look at history before it happened.  The director does this by examining symptoms of communal guilt, denial, and random acts of violence, all leading to a societal breakdown, where a sense of dread pervades the overall stillness, feeling much more narratively accessible, though completely austere, more like a Bergman Scandinavian chamber drama on the absence of God, like THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957) or WINTER LIGHT (1963).  Using a restrained and achingly slow pace, it has the comforting feel of a bedtime story with a malicious streak as a narrator describes a prequel to WWI in a typical rural town in northern Germany that thrives on its cohesive community structure which becomes a mirage, like a house of straw, where the foundation is discovered to be rotten to the core, where children are beaten or cruelly molested, women are humiliated by the pompous arrogance of loathsome men, and where an unseen cruelty creeps into the lives of virtually everyone.   

From the outset, the film is narrated by an unseen elderly man (Ernst Jacobi) many years into the future recalling events of an earlier time, where his own life is played by a school teacher (Christian Friedel) who comes from another village, but interestingly, he begins his story by saying it may not actually be true, but he is recalling the bizarre events in the village in order to “clarify things that happened in our country,” which is certainly a comment on both history and memory, each subject to individualized recollections that have a tendency to reflect how we want to remember things.  Because of the prevalence of a narrator throughout, this is reminiscent of Fassbinder narrating his own novelesque EFFI BRIEST (1974) or John Hurt’s biting sarcasm in von Trier’s brutally disturbing DOGVILLE (2003), each exposing characters trapped in the social convention of the 19th and 20th centuries respectively, where society’s alleged good intentions end up suffocating the inhabitants, as defined by Fassbinder’s alternate title:  “Effi Briest, or Many who have an idea of their possibilities and needs nevertheless accept the prevailing order in the way they act, and thereby strengthen and confirm it absolutely.”  In this way, while this story is a tale of ordinary German citizens, Haneke uses a claustrophobic atmosphere of brutal oppression to sow the seeds of what will eventually become a nation of Nazis.  He does this by examining not just the prevailing authority figures, but also the behind-the-scenes behavior of their own children, many of whom will one day be called upon to fight for the Third Reich.  The film shares with Bertolucci’s The Conformist (Il Conformista) (1970) the idea that sexual repression and social conformism are prime instigators of fascism, though it may have more in common with Bertolucci’s epic drama 1900 (1976), which similarly features a central patriarchal landowner whose peasants rebel against him. 

 

In an unusual turn, none of the adults have names, referred to only by their titles of pastor, schoolteacher, doctor, midwife, or Baron and his wife the Baroness, while the children all have names, though they are viewed collectively throughout, each with Aryan features, often seen in groups, where their motives are constantly questioned, but remain largely a mystery.  Living in feudal times where poor tenant farmers from guest-workers from Poland are brought in to help harvest the annual crops, most all of the land is owned by the Baron, who lives in an immaculate estate, where he is the biggest employer in the village.  At the turn of the century, the aristocracy included 3000 individuals who owned 15% of Germany’s arable land, yet employed more than 60% of the nation’s work force as farm hands, exactly as depicted here.  The Baron is viewed as an authoritative yet benevolent figure, throwing an annual harvest festival for the entire village once the crops have been harvested, an annual rite of food and drink and dancing, though there is plenty of underlying animosity from the class disparities.  There are a series of unexplained catastrophes that suddenly affect the residents of the village, where certain individuals are apparently targeted for acts of malicious violence, as if sending a message, yet these acts speak for themselves, as there are no follow up repercussions except more retaliatory acts.  At least on one occasion we see the actual perpetrator, as the pastor’s oldest daughter Klara (Maria-Victoria Dragus) is humiliated by her father in front of her classmates, so she sneaks into his office and gets revenge, impaling his parakeet with a pair of scissors, which are left in the form of a crucifix, suggesting she may be a hidden ringleader.  While everyone is a suspect, no one is arrested and the crimes are nearly forgotten, instead, life goes on with the village inhabitants barely even acknowledging the events.  In this way, with societies turning a blind eye, atrocities are allowed to continue.  What the film suggests is that when the majority refuses to act, a vocal minority may rise from the midst invoking terror, such as modern era Radical Islamists or neo-Nazi white nationalists. 

While all his others films have contemporary settings, this is the lone period piece, taking place in an idyllic pastoral world beautifully expressed by natural landscape grandeur, where there are two forces of evil in play, the perversity of the authoritative men, the supposed pillars of the community holding positions of responsibility, each representing a different aspect of power, where their harsh cruelty has an effect on their collective children, whose equally perverse and disturbing behavior goes unnoticed, like an invisible force that has been tainted by a strain of malice, yet they are always around when bad things happen.  Due to the slowly evolving chamber structure of the story, moving from family to family, where what the audience sees is a slowly evolving moral void, much of it through the harsh recriminations of the utterly intolerant local pastor (Burghart Klaussner), a repressive German Protestant fundamentalist who shames and ostracizes his subjects, offering little compassion or wisdom, beating his children for trifling offenses, forcing them to wear shameful white ribbons as armbands (like the Jewish star or the Nazi armbands) to remind disobedient children of innocence and purity, meant to invoke the fear of God, from a man who would be right at home in the bleakest Bergman dramas, where the subject might be a crisis in faith, but here it’s more a collective community absence of moral responsibility, given a completely austere look by the black and white imagery shot by Christian Berger, which was initially shot in color with much of the interior scenes bathed in candlelight or kerosene lamps.  Much of the film’s insights are hidden in small, intimate conversations, like the awkwardly shy moments between the schoolteacher and his virginal fiancé Eva (Leonie Benesch), 14-years his junior, or the schoolteacher scolding Martin (Leonard Proxauf), the pastor’s oldest son, for risking his life on the narrow rail of a bridge high above a stream, only to be told he was allowing God the opportunity to take his life, or when the pastor’s youngest son Rudi (Miljan Châtelain), still untainted by the toxic surroundings, naively asks his sister Anni (Roxane Duran) about death (his mother died in his own childbirth), told forthrightly, unhesitatingly, without an ounce of artifice.      

While the subject of fascism is never addressed, the utopian agrarian dream that formed the basis of mythological Nazi allure was from its outset a firmly planted lie.  Leave it to Haneke to unveil a continuing series of mysteries drenched in a suffocating atmosphere where no secrets are ever revealed, like a riding accident intentionally caused, a work accident which leads to acts of retribution, suicide, and humiliating acts of violence inflicted against children, including a beating of the Baron’s son, a barn burning, a younger child is deliberately placed next to an open window in the middle of winter and almost dies of pneumonia, and eventually a beastly attack on a child with Downs Syndrome that may leave him blind, with each strange event affecting the next, yet each remaining elusively out of rational comprehension.  The sheer meanness of the adults is as exasperating as the secretive, near cultish behavior of the children, who may be behind some or all of these events.  But instead of finding out what really happened, it remains the subject of rumors and gossip and eventually family lore.  The schoolteacher himself, who also doubles as the church choirmaster, and his devoted young fiancé Eva, both town outsiders, are an innocent couple unscathed by the macabre evil that surrounds them, and represent a vein of hope in a wicked world imploding in its own self-destruction, eventually leading to WWI and beyond.  It's a fascinating film, though perhaps not one of Haneke’s most provocative, as it tends to be simplistic in its personification of evil, finding the seeds of fascism (or terrorism) in religious hypocrisy and a crushing authoritarianism, where societies refuse to stand up to their own home grown cruelties.   Made during the Bush years in America which allowed the continued perpetuation of war and torture with so little public outcry, especially from elected officials, where Haneke never really connects the historical threads, leaving it instead vague and ambiguous.