Is ‘The Zone of Interest’the film with which Jonathan Glazer is competing in the official section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, the definitive work on the banality of evil? The most uncomfortable movie ever made about Nazi barbarism? Although the frenzy at Cannes is fertile ground for hyperbole to run wild, there is no doubt that Glazer’s fourth feature has made an impact. His proposal is radical, in fact, like the issue at hand.
When it was learned in 2019 that the director of the acclaimed ‘Under the Skin’ was going to adapt the novel by martin amis ‘The zone of interest’, we wondered how he would manage to bring to the big screen the story of a Nazi officer who falls in love with the Jewish woman of a sonderkommando.
Well, there is little in the film of that plot, which takes its title from the novel by the recently deceased writer to imagine the daily life of the family of the commander-in-chief of the SS Rudolf Höss who runs the Auschwitz extermination camp during the days of the Wannsee Conference, which formalized the so-called ‘final solution’. A story of minimal wickerwork amplified by a shocking staging.
Hyperrealism and out of field
The question of the images of the barbarity of Auschwitz and the extermination camps have been the subject of discussion for decades (from filmmakers like Claude Lanzmann or Alain Resnais to art theorists like George Didi-Huberman), and for this reason off-screen has become the key rhetorical element in dealing with genocide without showing images of sadism and implicit horror.
Now, the off-screen that Glazer works on is not the same off-screen used by László Nemes in ‘The Son of Saúl’ (2015), a film that was literally a circuit through the horror of an extermination camp with the Saúl of title in focus and the rest blurred. The opening bars of ‘The Zone of Interest’ suggest that Glazer will follow a similar strategy: the black screen with disturbing background noise leaves no room for doubt. Nevertheless, the British director’s device is more complex but also more limiting.
On one side, the hyperrealism with which his images shine embrace the sinister from an extremely disturbing place, sometimes bordering on horror movies. On the other hand, the camera never enters Auschwitz, even though the family home where the bulk of the film takes place is attached to the walls of the extermination camp.
Any of us would flee from life in such a place, attached to barbarism, but the days of Rudolf Höss’s family, with their immaculate house, their swimming pool, their magnificent garden and their ad hoc greenhouse, are barely disturbed by smoke that expel the chimneys of the crematoria.
‘The Zone of Interest’: the banality of evil and the background noise of Mica Levi
the rigor with which Glazer structures the future of the Höss finds some vanishing lines that, however, give your exercise even stricter visual control, if it fits. A small subplot filmed with a thermal camera and in negative colors –which contrasts with the hyper-realistic patina with which the Nazi family is portrayed– leaves room for the victims of the Holocaust, while, towards its corollary, a trip to the present returns to insist on the idea of the banality of evil from a more mundane position.
If there is a character who, precisely, embodies in all its magnitude the suggestive power of Nazism, either because of his ideas or because of the economic benefits that he included, it is the one played by Sandra Hüller (‘Toni Erdmann’), the wife of Commander-in-Chief Höss. The interpretation of the German actress captures with a disturbing subtlety the thesis of Hannah Arendt and explains, with just two strokes and four gestures, the reasons why an entire country surrendered in fervor to Hitler’s ideas, from vanity to careerism.
At the end of this text, we do not know if Glazer’s film will be the definitive one on this key issue surrounding evil and its acolytes, or if it will achieve the long-awaited Palme d’Or, but we are clear that is one of the critics’ favorite films in the official section of Cannes 2023.
For the nib that signs this review, the device proposed by Glazer impacts and at the same time limits its message, but, without a doubt, the sound design of Mica Levikey in the construction of the off-screen of ‘The Zone of Interest’, deserves to be recognized in Cannes and also beyond La Croisette.
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