Civil War

Civil War

Writer & Director ~ Alex Garland

2023, USA-UK

Stars ~ Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny

 

 

In a near-future USA, journalists in a civil war want to have words with the president.

 

Initially, not superficially choosing a side seems commendable. Garland even unites states that make American commentators say “Really? How? Why?” (Texas and California); but this is surely just in the service of muddying the waters. For example, an “ANTIFA massacre” is mentioned, but is it of or by? Although superficially meticulously vague, intent is obvious from the start when the presidential character stumbles around a speech along the lines of “Some says it’s the best triumph of humankind”; and the finale underscores this. A civil war has been brought about by such a character and the people are left in a warzone, swaggering guns and cameras without knowing really who they’re shooting.

 

Who exactly is the end target? The warmongers compromising journalists’ humanity? Audiences not paying attention to horrific reportage as a warning? If there’s the message that we don’t heed journalism as a warning, the film seems a little old-fashioned as the real-world scrutiny has surely now widened to the responsibility journalism has for entertaining “Alternative Facts” and platforming those that promote scams, conspiracies, division, and hatred. Social Media is suspicious by its absence of omnipresence. These are the very things that have put this presidential figure where he is and brought about this civil war, surely?  

 

 

In the end, this conjuring trick of negligible fence-sitting means we are left with the human drama: it’s about the characters and their experience of war. This mostly consists of driving through war-torn suburbs in the kind of tableaus familiar to post-apocalypse genre. We know straight away that Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) is there to take on Lee’s (Kirsten Dunst) mantle. As soon as Lee saves Cailee during the opening action, you can tell Lee is going to be one of those stubborn, headstrong, careless, and slightly clueless youngsters that is going to get others killed. And when other side characters suddenly turn up, they may as well wave placards saying “Expendables”, especially as we know from the trailer that we have the scene-stealing Jesse Plemons moment coming up. As haunted and convincing as Dunst is, as much as Wagner Moura emotes as he falls to his knees and cries/screams in grief as soldiers pass by, there isn’t much new or insightful here with Spaeny especially coming across as mere device.

 

What we do get is a run of impressive set-pieces and sound-design, and direction that is equally mainstream generic as it is engrossing. It’s bigger and grander but somehow less distinctive than Garland’s previous films. In their interview with Simon Mayo,Garland and Kunst nod that the film is a warning about the rise of fascism, and Mayo subsequently commented on the show that it wouldn’t work so well at any other time. It certainly feels of-the-moment and away from that, in the future, what will remain is a film that is less than the sum of its parts. But if we’re meant to reflect on our responsibility to images of war, this still ends on a mainstream Blow It Up! finale which is exciting, fully explosive, and immersive and makes the journey worthwhile, but nevertheless undermines any previous thematic pensiveness.  

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.