directed by Jonathan Glazer
director of photography Łukasz Żal
soundtrack Mica Levi
running time: 1h45'
A very important and beautiful film, one that you will not be able to forget.
It tells of the notorious 'banality of Evil,' as the philosopher Hannah Arendt defined it, (A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963), whereby Nazism led trivial men to commit heinous evil with ruthless indifference.
Director Jonathan Glazer, a Londoner whose origins can be traced back to his ancestors' escape during the pogroms of the Russian Empire in the early 20th century, makes this film with mastery and an off-beat contemporary gaze.
He had already hit the mark with his 2013 film Under the Skin, based on Michel Faber's beautiful novel of the same name.
The most important aspect of The Zone of Interest, as the Nazis called the area around a concentration camp ("Das Interessengebiet"), lies in the way the film was inventively shot. Glazer wanted a set in which the actors did not know exactly where the cameras were, cameras that were hidden as they are in a reality show, and the crew did not work on the scenes in a way openly visible to the actors.
This technique gives the work a great sense of reality and takes out any spectacularism of the tragedy.
Glazer adds realism by shooting the film in a house actually located opposite the Konzentrationslager, transforming the location by a long and careful preparatory work into a house very similar to the one that SS Commandant Höss's family inhabited. In every frame of the film, Glazer tells us of the subtle horror of sharing physical domestic space with the key-place of the heinous Nazi Final Solution.
Glazer said it was important that the film be shown through a 21st century lens, and he wanted the cameras being distant, witnessing, observing.
The director of photography is the excellent Łukasz Żal, from Poland, who used natural light in this work in order to give viewers the idea of an Auschwitz camp that is not "anaesthetised", not romanticised, truthful in its rawness.
The young London-based composer and singer-songwriter Mica Levi, who also composed the soundtrack for Glazer's Under the Skin, created a powerful and perfectly unsettling soundtrack. It starts from the film's beautiful "prologue", devoid of images and action, where you only hear the sounds and watch a black screen for about 2 minutes, to tell the unspeakable horror.
The Zone of Interest movie is also adapted from a novel, of the same name, by Martin Amis, which, however, was only an inspiration for Glazer: the story of this film becomes an almost original story created by its director.
Glazer also bases his film very much on the true story of Rudolf Höss, the notorious SS commander who directed genocidal operations at Auschwitz for years and was one of the most efficient organisers of the mass extermination wanted by the Nazi party.
After about 2,500,000 persecuted people had already been annihilated in the Konzentrationslager under the systematic direction of Commandant Höss, the Reich entrusted him, as it is told towards the end of the film, with the task of murdering 430,000 Hungarian Jews, who were transported to Auschwitz and killed in less than two months in 1944.
Commandant Rudolf Höss (German actor Christian Friedel) has a wife, Hedwig, five children and a dog, a composed black Weimaraner: in love with the Polish countryside, they build a bucolic "dream life" next to the husband's workplace, the Auschwitz Konzentrationslager.
They settle, with domestic servants, in a bourgeois cottage, surrounded by a manicured flower garden bordering the concentration camp.
Höss has absolute devotion and zeal toward the goal of genocide and displays an apathetic coldness and terrifying detachment toward the horrors of the concentration camp.
We observe the same horrific emotional detachment in his wife Hedwig, (the talented German actress Sandra Hüller, already awarded Best Actress in a Leading Role in Justine Trier's Anatomie d'une Chute).
Hedwig has been allowed to tend the cottage garden, where there is also a greenhouse. Enamored with her flowering eden, she is pleased with the unofficial title "Queen of Auschwitz."
Hedwig is not oblivious nor unaware of the horrors. In fact, she takes advantage of them with satisfaction: furs, jewels, clothes, luxurious perfumes, all collected from Auschwitz victims, are delivered to her.
Everyone in the family is fully aware of what is happening behind the wall, and has a chilling indifference towards the extreme tragedy.
From the very beginning, we sense that the tone of voice of family conversations is apathetic and lacking in affectivity.
Around their house, screams, gunshots, sinister noises are heard day and night from beyond the barbed-wire walls. The family lives with them and does not pay attention to them.
Rudolf goes horseback riding in the countryside with his teenager son. The family goes for picnics on the banks of the river, enjoying an idyll with nature.
But the commander and father of the family notices that there are fragments of bones and other human cadaveric material in the river where his kids were playing, material that was brought downstream from the concentration camp. He abruptly orders his children to get out of the water, and quickly returns home to have the kids washed up by the servants.
Nobody comments.
The Nazi wives chat in the kitchen over coffee, gossiping and talking frivolously about the clothes recovered from the murdered Jew women.
Hedwig's mother pays a visit and is shocked.
Hedwig's husband secretly forces a very young inmate girl into sexual encounters.
Family life goes on, letting its dysfunctional situation seep out: a young daughter sleepwalks, a pre-teen son has mastered the treacherous art of sadism towards his innocent little brother, the children play with the semi-carbonised teeth of the victims, and hear the extreme and unmotivated violence that takes place over the wall, schooled in tacit assent by their parents.
We the viewers never enter the concentration camp.
The film is totally about being outside, next to the horror, and accepting it, contributing to it.
Glazer made careful and prolonged research for this film.
The character of the Polish girl, (played by Julia Polaczek), that secretly scatters apples at night by hiding them in the ground in order to help the prisoners survive - those who leave the camp for slave work-, is inspired by Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, a Holocaust witness, whom the director met during the ten-year preparatory stages of the film.
The house, bicycle, and clothes of the girl in the film belonged to the real heroine of the Polish resistance. "She lived in the house we shot in. It was her bike we used, and the dress the actor wears was her dress. That small act of resistance, the simple, almost holy act of leaving food, is crucial because it is the one point of light. It felt impossible to just show the utter darkness, so I was looking for the light somewhere and I found it in her. She is the force for good."
The fascinating night scenes in which the character appears were shot in negative with a high-resolution thermographic camera that makes the character glow in the dark. They are fairy-like, magical scenes, a rare moment of relief in the terrifying and monotonous development of the story.
In his acceptance speech for the two Oscars, (Best Sound and Best International Feature), director Glazer dedicated his work to this Polish woman, calling her "the girl who glows in the film as she did in life. I dedicate this [award] to her memory and to her resistance."
The film is most interesting because of its very unusual approach: the unspoken, only overheard; the unseen, only confusedly glimpsed, the hidden, the eluded are the elements that make, paradoxically, a very strong impact on this dramatic story.
I nurture gratitude and admiration for director Jonathan Glazer for this valuable work and for his great ideational talent that presents us with History in a non-didactic and extremely meaningful way.
(History cries out for revenge. And vengeance was carried out in 1947 by hanging Commander Höss, after the Nuremberg trial, where he confessed to be the perpetrator of three million murders. His sentence of death was carried out by intentionally bringing him back to Auschwitz.)
Actress Sandra Hüller stars as Hedwig Höss, wife of SS commander Rudolf Höss. Here she is holding her last born in the idyll of her garden, opposite Auschwitz concentration camp
Hedwig Höss tries on in front of the mirror the valuable fur coat just taken from a Jewish woman sent to the gas chamber in the Auschwitz Lager.
The film emphasises that the desire to take possession of Jewish property is one of the main drivers of the Nazi genocidal project.
In the film's beautiful opening scene, the Höss family has gone for a serene picnic in the Polish countryside around the Auschwitz Konzentrationslager.
The Polish maiden hiding food for the inmates' survival in the dark night.
This character is inspired by the true story of Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, a Holocaust witness, a young Polish girl who nightly tried to help prisoners.
Director Jonathan Glazer, in the center of the photography at the Festival de Cannes 2023, with his two leads Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller
London-based composer and singer-songwriter Mica Levi has created a powerful and perfect soundtrack.
The young musician worked with Jonathan Glazer earlier, on the soundtrack of Under the Skin (2013).
Both her works for director Glazer were awarded big prizes.
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