JONATHAN GLAZER: THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023) - NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL



The surreal made real

This is about the cozy family of the man who runs Hitler's worst extermination camp, at Auschwitz, in Poland. With Sandra Hüller, whose other starring role at Cannes this year was in Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall, winner of the Palme d'Or, making her, Sandra, at 45, this year a European cinematic "it" girl. Zone of Interest was adapted, very freely, from the eponymous novel of Martin Amis, who sadly died on May 19, the very day of its premiere in competition at Cannes, where it won the Grand Jury Award and FIPRESCI Prize. An excellent review is the one by Robbie Collin for The Telegraph. That is good; but it's difficult to describe Zone of Interest in a review because Glazer's film has its own unique skin-crawling oddity and spot-on specificity -- a combination hard to convey.

The premise, almost but not quite a violation of the rule against directly representing the Holocaust, is to focus primarily on the household of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz camp. Sometimes the best way to show the un-showable is to approach it crabwise, shine the light on what's next to it, which is just what is done here. English director Jonathan Glazer (in his first film since the admired but off-putting sci-fi film Under the Skin in 2013) conveys the death camp from the commandant's house - and gardens, and greenhouse, and stable; it's a luxurious spread - though thrown up only three or four years ago, right on the other side of the 12-foot barbed-wire-topped wall surrounding the camp. We see the tops of buildings, but mostly we see nothing, we hear.

The film begins even further away. First there is the long din of an ominous droning score behind a faintly glowing blank screen, then a scene of the family bathing at a wooded river nearby. There are attendants, the wife Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) and Rudolf (Christian Friedel), and five children: when they return home down the sylvan road, it's in two shiny little black forties cars.

At the swim, the roar of the death camp seems inaudible, but this is a beginning of the film' spot-on conveyance of period in clothes and mannerisms, even the unathletic German forties body of Höss himself, and his hitched-up black swim briefs, his white skin. The house is luxurious, if seen through the ample grounds, the well-tended garden, and the staff; but it's also rinky-dink, no ancestral mansion. Everything looks chintzy seen from the viewpoint of 21st-century manufacturing amplitude, and we realize Nazi officers probably wore uniforms of not-so-good cloth.

The space next to the unspeakable place is made more contained and intense in Glazer's film through having every room in the house as Robbin Collin describes it "rigged with multiple static cameras which coolly survey the family’s daily routine." Their black dog rambles around among them. Their behavior too seems quite random at times, making the rectilinear spaces the more dominant. The clothes, the bedding and the uncomfortable looking beds, the generous German-made "oriental" rugs, the boys' room and their toy soldiers and toy "Heil Hitlers," the garden bare and empty out of season - everything conspires to strengthen our sense of this place, and by that indirection the ominousness of the other space right on the other side of the wall.

By not talking about the elephant the elephant is made present for us as something that could only exist because so many pretended it didn't. By depicting an "ordinary" family next door, it has shown how surreal, impossible, and inhuman Auschwitz was.

Our sense of the sleazy and impoverished grows when Hedwig's mother comes for a visit, her first time. She extravagantly admires the big room she's to sleep in, and the flowers in the vase, the garden outside. "You've really landed on your feet," she tells her daughter. We learn she used to clean the house of a rich Jewish woman: she wonders if the latter is now on the other side of the wall, and wishes they had gotten hold of the lady's lovely curtains. Hedwig jokes about how friends misunderstood when she told them her nice new fur coat came from "Canada." "Canada" was the name for the warehouse where Jewish seized possessions were stored. Hedwig and her mother are up from poverty. They are lowly thieves or would-be thieves enjoying the fine possessions whose owners, their betters, are being exterminated.

Hedwig's mother disappears, leaving a note, tossed by Hedwig into the stove without explanation. One gathers she may have turned out to be more sensitive to the crackling gunshots and roaring crematoriums than her daughter; realized she "landed on her feet" at too great a cost.

Through its precise period detail the whole aim of this movie up to a point is simply to convey the queasy, sick-making Gemütlichkeit of this house next to Auschwitz with maximum surreal intensity. But the bureaucratic focus of Martin Amis' source book comes through too, starting with a phone call in which Höss learns he's to be transferred.

When she first gets word of this a week later, Helga freaks out, running after him to insist he go right to Hitler to request he keep the house for the family even if himself working elsewhere. This security, the comfort for the children, this stolen fur coat, mean more to her than her husband's status - and when Rudolf says a farewell to his horse, it's clear the latter means more to him than his wife - or than his long-haired mistress, doubtless an attractive female prisoner.

More of the bureaucratization of evil comes when some time later we see a huge meeting - the number of camps and their commandants now staggering, and seen from above around a huge table - where it turns out Höss has actually been promoted and will return to Auschwitz to run a greatly enlarged "Hungarian" operation. It is such good news he excitedly calls his wife to tell her of it. But as he climbs down the stairs to leave the government building, he repeatedly retches. Either he is dying or the enormity of what he's involved in has finally gotten a grip on his body. There have been other stunning pauses of ominious sound and a blank screen, and a glimpse of attendants cleaning the displays for the present-day Auschwitz museum, with its shoes piled high. The crabwise echo of enormity will haunt us in a new way after Zone of Influence . An original and thought-provoking stunner full of controlled passion and great mastery of detail. One of the year's best films.

Zone of Influence, 105 mins., debuted at Cannes May 19, 2023 winning the Grand Jury award and FIPRESCI Prize; also Telluride, Toronto, Deauville, Zurich, Mill Valley. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival, Sept. 29-Oct. 15, 2023. Showing in the NYFF Oct. 8 and 9; Q&As with the director and stars. Other festivals. Coming in limited US release Dec. 8, 2023. Metacritic rating: 95%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.