The Zone of Interest
Beware, spoiler alert.
It's a holocaust movie. It's fantastic.
Schindler's List is great but plays for the gut, for the emotions. The Zone of Interest is more subtle and more disturbing and I suspect it's going to haunt me for some time to come. You don't see any violence but you see indications of it and you certainly hear it, albeit muffled and at a distance.
The basic premise (based on real historical characters): Rudolf Höss, the Commander of Auschwitz, lives with his family (and contingent of Polish slave housemaids and gardeners) in a nice house with a lovely garden, slap-bang next to the wall of the death camp. He runs the camp with bureaucratic efficiency; his wife Hedwig runs the home with a similar control. They are finally living the bucolic, idealised Good Life that they dreamed of when they first met. Their lives are ordinary, workaday, banal. The family picnics by the river, the children play games, Hedwig intones the names of the garden flowers to her baby, Rudi turns off the shower by the small swimming pool. And in the background, over the wall, flames belch out of the tall chimney. The children's rooms glow a faint orange at bedtime, as the chimney belches flame and smoke day and night.
It's directed by Jonathan Glazer, who made the excellent Sexy Beast, and it's scripted and filmed in German (so obvs I watched with English sub-titles, at the pop-up cinema in The Cock at Stony). Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller are superb as the two leads. Technically, the film is unusual and quite brilliant. Filmed only either in close up or in long shot and using only natural light, it's beautiful to look at in a muted way. The interiors all feature corridors, doors and staircases. There's a hint of Vermeer in the look. The drone-like music (played over the extended black screen after the opening credits and, especially, the entire sound of the film, has rightly garnered high praise. Life in the nice house is lived against a background hum of engines and whistles and the incinerators and the screams of the prisoners, the guards' abusive yells, and gunshots. Outside the camp, you can choose not to look but you can't choose not to hear.
Although the storyline is straightforward and linear, there's a handful of inserted scenes that are a leap of the imagination and are quite haunting. A couple of them feature an (apparently true) story of a Polish resistance girl who goes out at night to deposit apples for the camp slave workers to find. As no artificial light is used, it's filmed using infra-red night-vision. It looks very disturbing and is overlaid with Höss reading fairy tales to his children - tellingly, one of the fairy tales is Hansel and Gretel, specifically the part where Gretel tricks the wicked witch and burns her to death in the oven. The other insert is when Höss is walking out of the German command building. He goes along corridors and down flights of stairs. He looks down one corridor and suddenly we see modern day Auschwitz, before opening hours, with the army of cleaners sweeping the floors of the gas chambers and cleaning the glass of the exhibitions. It's gently shocking.
As you probably know, the film won two Oscars: Best International Feature and Best Sound. Both richly deserved. Do yourself a favour, go see this film. On a big screen if possible and with a decent sound system.
9/10
_________________ I don't need your ill-informed, half-baked, idiotic opinions. I have plenty of those myself.
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