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.      

2020 Top Ten List #2 There Is No Evil (Sheytan vojud nadarad)

 

Director Mohammad Rasoulof

Baran Rasoulof accepting the Golden Bear for her father

 

THERE IS NO EVIL (Sheytan vojud nadarad)                    A-                                                     Iran  Germany  Czech Republic  (150 mi)  2020 ‘Scope  d:  Mohammad Rasoulof

A disturbing yet meditative essay on the death penalty in Iran, where in the year 2017 the nation of Iran carried out half of the world’s total executions while continuing to execute a higher number per capita than anywhere else in the world (just last year Iran executed 225 people, compared to 22 in the USA), a frightful example of a repressive authoritative state running amok, with the director stringing together four Kafkaesque morality tales, all tragically interconnected, emphasizing freedom of choice and the power of saying “no” in an autocratic society, each commenting differently on the subject, examining in many ways the consequences of one’s actions.  Despite working with a miniscule budget, this is a full-blown art film of the highest standards, where the acting is superb, while the writing offers enough variation to keep viewers on edge, maintaining suspense throughout, named the winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin Festival.  Rasoulof has a long and protracted history with the Iranian government, beginning with his dispute of the 2009 Iranian presidential election of President Ahmadinejad, calling it rigged and a fraud, describing Iran as a dictatorship where artists may no longer speak freely and are routinely arrested and tortured under interrogation, as he was the following year along with filmmaker Jafar Panahi, both sentenced to six years in prison for “conspiring against national security and spreading propaganda against the Islamic government.”  Furthermore, both were banned from making films, writing scripts, giving interviews, or traveling abroad for 20 years, each stripped of their passports, a blatant attempt by the Shiite fundamentalist regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to silence two internationally acclaimed directors and politically intimidate any other artistic critics of the regime.  The sentence was later reduced to one year in prison.  Shortly after winning his Golden Bear, he was given the summons to serve the one-year jail sentence that the Iranian Revolutionary Court imposed on him (along with a two-year ban on travel), but he has not complied due to the outbreak of the coronavirus.  Earlier this year, 55,000 Iranian prisoners were released due to concerns about the spread of Covid.  Undeterred, and despite continued harassment and repeated arrests, Rasoulof continues to make films (which are banned in his own country), actually shot by his assistants, where he directs remotely, providing very precise shot lisitings, though his name is never mentioned on the crew lists and production schedules, receiving critical accolades at both the Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals.  In the tradition of Kieslowski’s A SHORT FILM ABOUT KILLING (1988), an expanded sequence on the death penalty from his masterful The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988), or more recently Boo Jungfeng’s Apprentice (2016), examining execution practices in Singapore, which in the late 90’s led the world in per capita executions, we are reminded of German-born American philosopher Hannah Arendt, who introduced the phrase “the banality of evil,” believing no human is born evil and that people are victims of the systems in which they live.  In covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of Hitler’s Final Solution who helped identify and coordinate the transportation of millions of Jews from occupied Europe to Nazi death camps, carrying out his duty with a horrible efficiency, yet after examining 3,600 pages of police interrogations, Arendt did not see a monster or psychopath in him but considered him to be a mid-level bureaucrat who would do anything for a promotion.  That is Rasoulof’s assessment as well, where the following incident may have prompted the making of the film, with the director revealing:

Last year, I spotted one of my interrogators coming out of the bank as I was crossing a street in Tehran. Suddenly, I experienced an indescribable feeling. Without his knowledge, I followed him for a while. After ten years, he had aged a bit. I wanted to take a picture of him on my cellphone, I wanted to run towards him, reveal myself to him, and angrily scream at him all of my questions. But when I looked at him closely, and observed his mannerisms with my own eyes, I could not see an evil monster.

How do autocratic rulers metamorphose people into becoming mere components of their autocratic machines? In authoritarian states, the sole purpose of the law is the preservation of the state, and not the facilitation and regulation of people’s relations. I come from such a state.

And driven by such personal experiences, I wanted to tell stories that asked: as responsible citizens, do we have a choice when enforcing the inhumane orders of despots? As human beings, to what extent are we to be held responsible for our fulfillment of those orders? Confronted by this machine of autocracy, when it comes to human emotions, where does the duality of love and moral responsibility leaves us?

While Rasoulof has examined this subject before in Manuscripts Don't Burn (Dast-neveshtehaa nemisoosand) (2013), that film becomes bogged down in the weight of its own subject, yet this is more profoundly lyrical, offering some of the most exquisite locations to ever grace the screen, simply stunning in their beauty, much like an earlier film, The White Meadows (Keshtzar haye sepid) (2010), becoming an allegorical narrative combining four different stories, each shot independently, like film shorts, with a shifting style and genre element, all stunning in their traumatic impact, with each setting growing farther and farther remote.  The opening segment is entitled “There Is No Evil,” a family drama set in the rush of Tehran big city life centered around Heshmat (Ehsan Mirhosseini), a heavy-set man with a beard caught up in a daily routine, performing the mundane ordeals in the everyday life of a typical middle-class family in Iran, calmly enduring the nagging presence of his constantly complaining wife, while trying to appease an overdemanding, spoiled young daughter as well.  As he fights his way through city traffic, with blaring noise and reckless vehicles constantly darting in and out directly in front of him, it’s a relief to finally get home and enjoy some quiet moments.  Taking a nap that extends to the middle of the night, an alarm awakens him at 3 am, when he takes a shower, gets dressed, and is off to work in the wee hours of the morning, parking in a massive garage, finding his way to a non-descript room where he sits and waits.  When a series of green lights appear on a screen, he presses a button that produces a truly shocking surprise, an astounding moment that takes one’s breath away, superbly prefaced by the banality of such ordinary events.  The second episode, “She said, you can do it,” is an equally oppressive setting, with young men jailed in tight prison quarters, yet they wear official uniforms.  Using military conscripts instead of trained professional staff, part of the basic training in fulfilling the 2-year military service forces them to participate in executions of fellow citizens, becoming complicit in the government’s killing apparatus, yet Pouya (Kaveh Ahangar) can’t imagine killing another man.  However, with an honorable discharge, he can apply for a passport and realize his dream of leaving Iran to live abroad with his girlfriend.  Openly tearful, on a cellphone with his girlfriend, he pleads for help finding a way out of this predicament.  The other men chime in, offering their own comments on his moral dilemma, suggesting he’s no better than the rest of them, mostly suggesting soldiers follow orders, as if you don’t they make things very difficult afterwards, increasing your required years of service while refusing passport and driver’s license requests, finding it hard to ever work again.  While the setting is drab and dreary, no windows, all color washed away, it’s a peculiar arrangement to find them imprisoned, as none are accused of committing a crime.  At the bewitching hour when his name is called, Pouya is reluctantly released, with another guard ordering him to get the prisoner, handcuffing himself to that prisoner as they walk down a long, empty corridor, falling occasionally, whimpering with dreaded anticipation, with the guard pulling him up, barking encouragement at him, as the roles are reversed, as the convicted prisoner is perfectly calm while the accompanying military guard is behaving like it’s his own life on the line.  In a split second, however, Pouya grabs the guard’s automatic weapon and locks the two of them up as he makes his escape, a harrowing journey accompanied by pulsating music, suddenly turning into a suspenseful prison escape thriller with an uncertain outcome, brilliantly culminating with an Italian anti-fascist song of resistance, Milva - Bella Ciao - YouTube (2:42).

If the first two segment feature oppressive settings, the next two are mesmerizingly beautiful, capturing the natural world like few films do, magnified even further by being shot in ‘Scope by Ashkan Ashkani, with the third segment entitled “Birthday.”  Opening with magnificent shots of distant mountains, Javad (Mohammad Valizadegan), a young soldier on a three-day pass is crossing the vast openness of the country by train until he arrives at a remote location in a dense forest near the Caspian Sea.  Cleansing himself off in the river, he heads for an isolated home in search of his fiancée, Nana (Mahtab Servati), bringing a ring, asking her father’s permission to propose on her birthday.  But the situation is dour as they’ve just learned of the death of a close family friend, a teacher who was viewed as a son by her father, beloved by all who knew him, yet Nana never mentioned him before, so this revelation comes as an unexpected surprise.  With mixed emotions, the family plans for a funeral service, hiring musicians and holding a personal family ceremony for the recently deceased, including candles lit alongside a giant photograph.  Once Javad takes a look at the photo, his heart sinks, immediately growing ill, throwing himself into the river, as if washing away his sins, drawing the attention of Nana, providing him a dry set of clothes, with Javad realizing his own dark connection to the deceased, having participated in his execution as an enemy subversive, creating a situation where the political becomes personal.  Afterwards they hold an engagement celebration, revealing nothing to the family, yet both appear like zombies or the walking dead, void of all emotion, where the hours pass like years.  When it’s time to return, his fiancée simply walks away without uttering a word.  The final segment is entitled “Kiss Me,” featuring the director’s daughter Baran Rasoulof as Darya, a college student receiving her education as a medical student in Germany, visiting her aunt Zaman (Zhila Shahi) and uncle Bahram (Mohammad Seddighimehr) in what has to be the most remote region in Iran, a hilly yet desolate outpost where they raise bees.  With miles and miles as far as you can see of utter isolation, it soon becomes clear they are living lives of self-imposed exile, visiting with her father’s approval, as Bahram appears near death, having serious episodes coughing up blood, tenderly cared for by his wife, with Darya looking on, wondering why her uncle received a medical degree just like her father, educated at the same school, but then threw it all away to live out in the wilderness tending to bees.  Their story is inexorably connected to earlier episodes, resembling a classic tragedy, morphing into the ethical dilemma of Antigone, depicting what happens when an individual insists upon their moral beliefs and challenges the authority of the state, in this case altering the equilibrium, uprooting their families, exchanging children for their own safety, then living with the consequences of remaining hidden away in secrecy, ultimately leading to questions years later of altered parentage.  Enraged and hurt by the revelation, Darya feels little sympathy, believing it was a selfish decision, yet Bahram calmly stands behind his actions.  With so many transplanted families due to the European migration of refugees, you’d think this is a relatively common practice, yet few films actually touch on this issue.  The final shot resembles one of those magnificently extended final shots from Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy (1987 – 1994), a perfectly composed shot that poetically expresses the emotional paralysis that sets in, unable to truly comprehend the extent of the personal sacrifice, literally laying it all on the line for one’s beliefs, yet her blazing anger reveals the cost.