Jonathan Glazer's new historical drama about the Holocaust won big at the Baftas last week and looks set to do the same at the Oscars, but does it do the horrific period justice from a Jewish perspective? Irene Wise reports…
The new historic drama from British director Jonathan Glazer takes its title from the Martin Amis novel on which it’s based and the immediate area that separated Auschwitz from the outside world, known euphemistically as the Interessengebiet – The Zone of Interest. Within that complex, camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) enjoyed life in a spacious villa, its bathing pool a mere splash away from the horrors next door.
The movie opens with a black screen and two minutes of discordant score – Glazer directing viewers to stare into the void. The dissonant darkness gives way to birdsong and a bucolic family picnic. Later, we see an infant, who is shown fragrant flowers in the garden that borders the notorious death camp. Nothing is explicit here. If you were not already familiar with the facts, you wouldn't grasp them from this movie.
Glazer’s film is technically brilliant. Full colour aestheticises the charmed life of the perpetrator and every shot is exquisitely framed by Polish cinematographer Lukasz Zal. The camera work and direction keep the audience at a distance, so you avoid feeling complicit, but remain in the uneasy role of voyeur.
There are a few monotone moments, strangely ethereal night scenes. A girl, the movie’s only active resister, leaves apples for the starving prisoners. In daylight, we glimpse the dropped fruit, indicating that this is not a fairy tale. Glazer based this sequence on the testimony of a real life former junior member of the Polish resistance, whom we know only as Alexandria.
Mica Levi’s disturbing composition opens and closes the movie, but most of the sound in the film is diegetic; people’s daily chat, underscored with Johnnie Burn’s soundscape, an indistinct mix of rattling trains, shrieks and screams. The soundtrack conjures the cries of crushed human souls and trampled bones of the murdered victims. Their cremated ashes are tipped onto the soil by a Jewish prisoner, fertilising the earth to produce pretty plants for the Nazis.
Höss, who has also been fictionalised in the lamentable book and movie The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, is seen riding horseback with his eldest son Klaus (Johann Karthaus). He swims in the river, until recoiling at human remains that float downstream. His children are forced out of the water, to be scrubbed by staff.
The servants are acquiescent local Polish women. Frau Höss scolds a housemaid, reminding her that she could be reduced to scattered ash. Another unfortunate woman services her boss. We see Höss clean himself assiduously afterwards and then pick up his child. Returning from duty at the camp, a worker must wash the blood from Höss’s boots. The fastidiousness of the mass-murderer.
Hedwig’s mother celebrates her daughter’s good fortune, but her sunbathing is spoiled by thick black smoke and she is troubled by views from the window. She leaves abruptly and Hedwig burns her goodbye note in the stove, as casually as her husband burned a million bodies.
The five Höss children do not escape their macabre environment. Daughter Inge-Brigitt (Nele Ahrensmeier) sleepwalks; Hans-Jürgen (Luis Noah Witte) witnesses violence from his bedroom window; and Klaus not only torments his younger brother, but also collects the gold teeth pulled from victims. Their mother greedily accepts clothes from Kanada, Auschwitz’s depot for the misappropriated property of doomed prisoners. She parades in front of the mirror in a full-length fur coat. Finding a lipstick in the pocket, she applies it to her finger, and then to her lips. The banality and vanity of evil.
Höss was transferred to Berlin in November 1943, while his wife stayed in the "paradise" of the villa with their children. Höss was to return the following spring, to supervise the killing of 430,000 Hungarian Jews. In the film, he telephones and proudly informs Hedwig of this appointment. His elation and her indifference to the news epitomise their villainy. Genocide is his career; she’s more excited by the pickings.
What does this film tell us about Nazi pathology, the distortion of conscience and reality that allowed evil to become the norm? Glazer wants us to realise “our similarity to the perpetrators”, but observing Höss’s meticulous domesticity or catching his wife’s inane chatter, does not further the understanding of our own psyche any more than it illuminates the rationale behind Nazi criminality. We are all guilty of turning a blind eye to hideous events in the news and sometimes on our own doorstep, but Höss is not a bystander. His defence was that he murdered “only two and one half million” people.
Glazer’s stunning film is designed to unsettle with sound and haunt the audience with its artistry, but the Jewish victims are almost invisible and we are taught nothing new about their callous murderers. The Zone of Interest is beautifully produced, but like its protagonists, there is a vacuity at its core.
By Irene Wise
Photos courtesy of A24 Films
The Zone of Interest is out now in select UK cinemas. a24films.com