Jonathan Glazer‘s Holocaust film The Zone of Interest (2023) is one of the most anticipated and talked about films of the season. The film is interesting and this is not a surprise. Glazer is a director and screenwriter who proposes unique personal visions in each of his films. This time the challenge is huge, because the genre of films about the Holocaust is extremely populated and diverse, and the emotion and implications that accompany discussions of the most terrible genocide in history have reverberations in the way books (documentary or fiction), films or other artistic productions related to this theme are valued. As we move away from the events, in the years when the last survivors and the last direct testimonies disappear into history, it is art that takes over part of the support of the memory. Glazer started from
Martin Amis‘ penultimate novel, ‘The Zone of Interest’, but kept only the title and general approach from it. Unlike the English novelist, he gave the characters of his film their true identity: Rudolf Höss – the commandant of the Auschwitz camp and the creator of the factory of death – together with his wife Hedwig and their five children. We could say that the film is (also) about the human dimension of these characters, but the problem is that the adjective ‘human’ does not fit well here.
‘The Zone of Interest‘ intents to be an argumentative exemplification of the term ‘banality of evil’ invented by Hanna Arendt in the book written after she had witnessed the trial of Adolf Eichman in Jerusalem. The main characters are one of the epitome of absolute evil. This is not about ordinary Germans who knew more or less, usually choosing how much they wanted to know, about the Holocaust happening right next to them. It is not even about simple executants. Rudolf Höss was one of the active participants in the extermination, a demon who commanded the death squads at Auschwitz and designed part of the extermination machine. Hedwig was also aware of everything that was going on behind the barbed wire fence, and in addition she was a direct profiteer, looting from the confiscated items of the prisoners who arrived at their final station. The two built a kind of apparent garden of heaven in the middle of hell, using the slave labor of the deportees and putting into practice an ideology that created a ‘living space’ for the ‘superior race’ by exploiting and exterminating the Jews and other peoples and categories considered ‘inferior’. It is the details that are the most shocking. Fear in the eyes of the women who serve in the house. The sinister games of Nazi children. The executioner’s obsession with hygiene. Bureaucratic approach and engineering planning of criminal activities. The Hösses and those around them never ask themselves any ethical questions. In fact, they do not seem to see the slave deportees as human beings. By this they take themselves out of humanity.
In times like ours, where Holocaust denial persists, such films are necessary. By removing one layer of fiction and choosing to restore the characters to their real identity, using or reconstructing archival documents about Auschwitz and its executioners, Jonathan Glazer chose not to make a film version of Martin Amis‘ book but the docudrama that could be the basis of the book. The main idea of the novel is repeated and elaborated, but after the first ten minutes we learn nothing new. The discourse about the banality of evil is dangerously close to trivialization. Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller interpret their roles with glacial cynicism. This is where I lacked nuancing. Although they are present on screen most of the time, we do not learn anything about the roots of the absolute evil that the two characters symbolize. A single allusion is made at one point to the wife’s modest social origins, in the discussion with her mother – the only character who seems to dissociate herself from what is happening around her. How did these ordinary Germans become faithful executors of criminal plans? National-Socialism did not emerge from the void. Jonathan Glazer tries to introduce special cinematic elements, but not all of them work. Dark screens for many tens of seconds are useless. The dream sequences and the one with the piano song were not clear to me when watching, the viewer needs to read about the documentation of the film to understand and place them where they need to be. The soundtrack, on the other hand, is terrific. I haven’t heard such a film in a long time and the expression ‘to hear the film’ is the correct one. The haunting music is written by Mica Levi. There are many original elements, more or less successful, and not all of them connect. The essence is missing.
Martin Amis died on the day of the film’s world premiere, which took place at the Cannes Film Festival. I would have really liked to know his opinion about the movie.