The Zone of Interest

 

 

The Zone of Interest

Director ~ Jonathan Glazer

Writers ~ Martin Amis, Jonathan Glazer

2023, US-US-Poland

Stars ~ Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Johann Karthaus

 

“What are you looking at?”

“Teeth.”

 

Glazer’s film is full of tiny moments that are simultaneously mundane, surreal, quotidian and chilling. From the moment that daddy steps out in uniform, to the way the son keeps glancing offscreen hinting towards a horror that we shall know of presently, to the giggly “Queen of Auschwitz” boast, the way these men discuss optimising their industry, and countless other instants. And that’s the point. Glazer talks of how his research showed up nothing truly remarkable about his central couple, except their ordinariness. Just an ordinary couple making their dream of a privileged life come true.

 

Except that couple are Rudolf and Hedwig Höss, the former the commandant of the most infamous of Nazi death camps. Possibly more than any other film, it requires you to bring with you a knowledge and a revulsion of the horror, one that is never seen but is heard and colours every inane utterance of dialogue. The closest we get is a close-up of Rudolph’s stern/indifferent profile (the skull on his collar) as the screams and terror of his workday play out around him, sounding like Dante’s inferno. And indeed, it is the aural film that we never see that terrifies. Johnnie Burns’s sound design and sound department works just as hard and effectively as anything onscreen for the increasingly disturbing effect of industrial noises and the constant, increasing pops of gunfire. Never have commonplace lives in extraordinary contexts been so repellent. 

 

Inspired by Martin Amis’ book, Glazer eschews narrative – this is virtually melodrama free, there’s barely a story (slight anxiety and friction when they are told they must move, developed from witness accounts) – wary of the tricks of cinematic fiction. The agenda is to avoid the comforts of screen dramatics, less this cheapens the disgust at this Banality of Evil. You will not find the tension and suspense deployed by the skills of Spielberg in ‘Schindler’s List’ here. Glazer vocally does not favour these for this truth. Some atrocities should not be seen. Rather, ‘The Zone of Interest’ utilises almost Brechtian techniques from the start: the credits roll but the screen is left black as the music progresses, forcing the viewer to abandon their need for the film to hurry up and get going. No, you must engage yourself, and this prolonged start is forcing you to slow down, to meet the film’s agenda. Instead of emotive music that will hold your hand, there is Mica Levi’s startling blasts of noise that certainly feels more akin to a horror film (similar hair-raising trick as her score for ‘Monos’). There are subtitles to piano, lyrics that the player is unaware of as she plays. There is thermal night vision for a digressive story of a girl at night leaving apples for prisoners to find. There is a vision of the future that brings home the scope and numbers. In other films, these devices might be as disruptive, as distracting as 3D, but here they serve to remind you that you are actively watching a dramatization of one facet of a vast atrocity, that you must not disassociate yourself from the role of witness. 

 

But it’s gorgeous to look at with a warm, clean palette that appeals to the desire to rewatch; it’s a challenging and haunting viewing but not gruelling in any explicit sense. It has the attractive look of old photographs achieved with naturalistic lighting (that dress looks the same green as the grass). This fidelity to natural lighting is also the reason for the thermal/night vision. And then you learn that they actually filmed in Auschwitz and that they filmed using cameras positioned around the house, “Big Brother” style. These are technical details that further impress and raise the material, and the more you know inspire repeat viewings.

 

 

A Jewish friend of mine said that his experience of watching the film was visceral, that it made him feel unsafe to watch, that he “shouldn’t be there”, and added that another of his friends reacted the same way. I would posit that watching people go about their ordinary lives while perpetrating and living adjacent to atrocity provokes a particular terror; fear of their standardising it, or giving it normality, leaving an appalling helplessness for the victims. Equally scary as malevolent men in uniform. Mark Kermode says, “I don't think this is the banality of evil. I think it's the kind of screaming silent horror of indifference or callousness.” And it’s hard to disagree with that, that absorbing atrocity as everyday life is terrifying, although it happens daily whether near or far.

 

In discussion, I have found myself spiralling out into relating the basis of the film to Goebbels’ ideas of propaganda and how that relates to advertising and business. And see how the nice clean look of the Höss’ home resembles the lifestyle magazines of aspiration very much. The faintly fractured presentation and non-reliance upon cinematic suspense and narrative leaves plenty of room to contemplate and ruminate, to spiral out into interrogations of civilisation, during and long after Mica Levi’s final choral assault.

 

A masterpiece not only of filmmaking but a success of artistic morality, then. Come armed with fear and outrage.

 

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Directed – Rudolph Carier

Adaptation – Nigel Kneale

1957, GB (b/w live TV broadcast)

Starring – Peter Cushing, Yvonne Mitchell, Donald Pleasance, André Morell

 

A fairly definitive adaptation: a BBC play filmed live seems correct for George Orwell's timeless warning about state control and dehumanisation, of fake truth and up-is-down cruelty crushing citizens, exercising power for its own sake. The message hasn’t dated so much. Certainly it was enough to cause controversy at the time, with its post-war grimness and doom-mongering.

 

Cushing is of course great, Donald Pleasance of course show-steals, and André Morell makes for a formidable O'Brien, just as scary in his slickness as Richard Burton was in his drollness in the 1984 adaptation. If some of the acting is a little on the ripe side, the minimalist sets with the inserted filmed sequences of genuine post-war bomb-sites make for an aptly barren backdrop. It's a tale that has lost none of its power. Or maybe its pertinence and poignancy comes around in historical cycles.

 

One of the greats, and this is an admirable adaptation.

Jojo Rabbit

Taika Waititi, 2019, Czech Republic-New Zealand-USA

Screenplay: Taika Waititi – Novel: Christine Leunens

‘Jojo Rabbit’ is being sold on the novelty of Taika Watiti as Hitler, and maybe this leads people to take is as a satire on fascism. But it seems to me that although it has satirical elements, it is far more akin to the magic-realism and the child’s fantastical interpretation of reality that’s rampant in the bildungsroman genre: ‘Celia’, ‘Class Trip’, ‘Alice in Wonderland’, ‘Afraid of the Dark’, ‘A Monster Calls’, etc, etc.

RobbieCollins is voracious in his criticism of ‘Jojo Rabbit’, feeling it and Waititi are not up to the task of acknowledging the full horror of the Holocaust, that it only acknowledges these horrors by trite sentimental symbolism such as CGI butterflies and carefully rendered frames of shoes. And I can appreciate where he’s coming from, but in this case I believe there is a misreading: as sentimental as these moments are, they are associated with Jojo’s loss and not the Jewish experience; the Holocaust is acknowledged in the girl’s brief monologue about her family. Of course, the Holocaust is in the background of everything although what’s surely what’s at stake is Jojo’s natural goodness. Collins’ feels the Nazi characters here are too cartoonish and therefore inadequate and objectionable as responsible representations of murderous fascism. Taika Waititi will not be troubling the satire Chris Morris for Waititi’s approach is far more irreverently scatological, but this is about a child’s small-town interpretation of the experience, far removed from the truth of what’s going on and absorbing the propaganda because it seems cool and fun.

And it seems to me that this is not a kids’ film and that an adult audience knows what’s at play here; that the surface is all a child’s perceptions and we recognise the reality beneath that, and that’s where the unease, humour and tragedy all work. The audience doesn’t need to be educated. For example, it’s in the way we can feel both deeply uneasy and amused that Jojo’s jubilant Seig Heiling through the town resembles a kid pretending to be an aeroplane.

It is surely obvious that Rebel Wilson’s character is psychotic and damaged right from her horrific-humorous declaration that she has birthed eighteen kids for the cause. Sam Rockwell’s character, Captain Klenzendorf, is a little more complex to parse, obviously a jaded soldier discarded to a small town to bring Nazi influence to its kids. Although he helps Jojo and doesn’t seemingly buy wholesale into the doctrine, he’s perhaps seemingly heroic to the kids but also wanting to absurdly dress himself as such to fight off the allies in a blaze of glory. Klenzendorf swings between doing good for our protagonist and yet, no matter how much he truly adheres to it, facilitates fascism. He’s conflicted. Stephen Merchant represents the Gestapo as a caricatured black-clad, thick-accented menace whose comment about people reporting hiding Jews which turn out to be mould behind the freezer isn’t funny, but more an indication of the character’s contempt and dehumanisation of Jews.

Roman Griffin Davis is fully engaging as Jojo, delightful, brattish and scary as he begins discovering empathy when he finds his mother is hiding a Jewish girl in the house. Both Scarlett Johansson and Thomasin McKenzie are effortlessly rich, defiant and vulnerable, easy gateways to pathos and emotional engagement even as Jojo is all over the place and everyone else are caricatures to the boy. Waititi is fun enough as a vaudeville Hitler, but despite being the face of the film, he takes second place to much else and recedes into hectoring bullying as the film gives way to darker experiences.

They’re speaking German as accented English, but however outdated this may be now, it speaks to the light comedy rather than funny accents. The aesthetic uses incongruous music and there is a scruffiness that allows all the criticisms in. There’s always been the kind of slightly shambolic edge to Waititi’s work, a tonal see-saw, that prioritises the emotional and entertaining over perfectionism; a flavour that seems to me to be uniquely Australian. ‘Jojo Rabbit’s emotive agenda takes more and more precedent so that it’s the dramatic resonance you are more likely to remember than the comedy. It ends with dance-moves – that surely are too modern – just as they are getting warmed up to new freedoms and possibilities. The final moments are perfectly pitched: although upbeat in effect, it doesn’t compromise the darkness and doesn’t promise an idealist future. And, although incongruous music choices are all the rage, using Bowie’s German-language ‘Heroes’ seems to me to be the correct pick, if you are going to use it.