Walking out of the cinema after watching The Zone of Interest, I was unsure of the movie's meaning. Was it illustrative of Hannah Arendt's concept of the "banality of evil"? Or was there something else or something more to it?
Based on Martin Amis' novel of the same name, though dramatically altered by director Jonathan Glazer, it portrays the life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and that of his family. The Höss clan live in a well-appointed house just across the barbed wire topped wall of the camp. Rudolph's wife, Hedwig, played by Sandra Hüller who was fantastic in Anatomy of a Fall, goes about her days as a domestic commandant, raising their 5 children, directing the household staff, and just getting on as a hausfrau of privilege.
The first 10 or so minutes of the movie create the stylistic template for what follows. We begin by seeing Glazer's directorial credit in black letters on a white background. This becomes the movie's title in white letters on a black blackground. The text slowly fades as some rather eerie music plays. And it serenades us into a feeling of discomfiture for a rather long time accompanied by a blank screen before the sounds of nature fade in to replace the disconcerting soundtrack.
That black void suddenly gives way to the lovely, verdant shore of what I presume is the Soła River where the Höss family is spending some leisure time. We are then transported to the Höss' home as Hedwig presents a canoe to her Mann as his birthday gift while their kindern ogle the lovely wooden vessel. There is nothing out of the ordinary here. Just a seemingly well-off family celebrating a birthday out in their backyard on a gorgeous sunny day. Then comes one of the most potent reverse shots in all of cinema as it reveals a barbed wired-topped wall that separates the idyllic family home (and the Hösses) from a concentration camp with its buildings visible above the wall and the extraordinary depravity within.
This opening sequence accomplishes a few things. First, the music embodies the ethos of the entire movie. As I noted above, there is an eeriness to it but the discordant melody is accompanied by a more conventional one that doesn't threaten with atonality. The lack of visuals here and the fade to the chorus of birdsong emphasize the important of sound in the movie. Second, we are introduced to the main settings - the home and the river. Third is the visual style. Paul Watts is the movie's editor and he makes match on action cuts with the precision of a surgeon. Similarly, cinematographer Łukasz Żal doesn't have a camera operator strap on a Steadicam for lyrical camera movement that follows Hedwig through the yard as her hands touch the flowers as you would see in a Terrence Malick movie. Instead the camera maintains its distance from its subject by always giving us medium or long shots and it moves in straight lines, often in Kubrickian tracking shots.
Action unfolds in a clinical way. When Rudolf walks through the house turning off lights, it's like we see every step he takes. They may be shown from varying angles (although always in medium or long shot) but the cuts leave out not one iota of movement. The movie's visual style is an embodiment of the stereotypical German love of order.
Rudolf meets with some enterprising men who have brought Taylorism to bear on genocide and designed a more effective crematorium which appeals to Rudolf. He seems to exhibit banal evil in the truest Arendtian sense. I don't recall him once disparaging Jews or Slavs or the retarded or the disabled or any of the people who would be killed under his watch. When he tells Hedwig that he is to be transferred to another post, he genuinely comes across as someone climbing the corporate ladder by doing his job with ruthless efficiency and not an ideologue who harbors a genocidal animus. Instead it is Hedwig who comments, albeit briefly and basically in passing, on a perceived inferiority of Jews. In another scene, she seems unperturbed by the fact that her nice coat used to belong to a Jewish woman who met a horrible fate at the hands of her husband's minions. It's more important to her that it be mended with a gentle hand.
We never see the atrocities unfolding next door to the Höss home but witness tangential events and, more importantly, hear them. As Hedwig shows her recently arrived mother (whose appearance reminded me of Hyacinth from Keeping Up Appearances) around their home, we hear shouts and gunshots coming from the camp. In one of the most harrowing scenes, Großmutter is awoken in the middle of the night by the din of camp's ovens and their infernal glow. She leaves immediately under cover of the night, not saying a word to anyone.
In another scene, Rudolf takes a couple of the kids out in his new canoe. While they play near the shore, he stands in the middle of the river fly fishing. When he pulls a human bone up from the waters, a desperate look of concern envelops his face and he shouts at the children to get out of the river as a plume of ashes from those hideous ovens floats downriver.
That is the movie in a nutshell: a nice, peaceful home life is intruded upon indirectly by the horrific factory of death next door.
There are a couple scenes that show a woman leaving food around what I presumed were work areas in or around the camp. They looked like they'd had a photo-negative filter applied to them but I've read that a thermal imaging camera was used to shoot these scenes. In one, she presses apples into a mound of dirt. Later we hear a camp guard dispatch with a prisoner who was found in possession of one of them.
Acts of kindness and empathy are rendered obscure, almost alien, by this effect while the Höss family go about their lives bathed in beautiful sunlight ignoring the horror just across the wall.
I found The Zone of Interest to be, well, not exactly to be funny, but to have some darkly funny scenes made of the blackest comedic building blocks held together by the sinews of absurdity. That scene I mentioned above where Hedwig shows her mother around their home comes to mind. They wander through the beautifully landscaped yard as Hedwig proudly describes the plants and all of the work that has gone into making the place into the family's home. All the while they both ignore the charnel house next door. That scene ends with Oma telling her daughter that she has done very well for herself.
Later Rudolf tells Hedwig that he is being transferred. She is very upset by the news and the couple have a conversation while standing on a pier on the river. As her husband pensively looks out across the water, Hedwig pleads with him to do everything he can to avoid the job change, appealing directly to Hitler, if he must. A couple is trying to figure out their lives together and the future of their children - this is serious stuff. Defeated, she declares that she is not leaving their home next to the camp. She points in the direction of the homestead and declares it, in one of the blackest comedic lines of all-time, to be their Lebensraum.
I really enjoyed the elements that grab you by the scruff and yank you out of the story. I'd argue that the look of the footage shot with a thermal imaging camera does that but there's also a scene where the camera surveys the flowers in the garden - close up, unlike any shot of a person - and the screen fades to red and some more of that strange, disconcerting music plays. Something lovely and melodic fights against a line that is foreboding and evil. But only briefly as the sound abruptly stops as the shot ends and we cut once again to the Höss household.
I wonder if Europeans have a collective need to remind themselves of the Holocaust every generation and if The Zone of Interest is, at least in part, a manifestation of that. A span of only 10 years necessitated Night and Fog. Maybe there is a meta element to this movie. Rather than simply illustrating the capacity of human beings to carve out a niche of normality for themselves amongst the horrors of inhumanity, perhaps The Zone of Interest is a challenge to the viewer. A challenge to keep in mind that the Holocaust is being perpetrated just out of frame as you engage with a domestic drama. The Hösses were able to keep the horrors of the camp from intruding on their lives. Are you also able to put them out of your mind and instead lose yourself in the lives of the characters?
That is how I make sense of the movie's ending. Rudolf is leaving his office and descending several flights of stairs. While the stairwell is lit, the hallways aren't and the visuals have a haunting mood to them. These shots are interspersed with those showing the quotidian routine of the cleaning staff at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial today. Rudolf stops at every floor to vomit or choke on some bile and here the building gives off a Jungian vibe with the commandant descending into his unconscious. He passes through the psychological inheritance bequeathed to him from his culture and society and becomes sickened. As he continues down to where his primitive self awaits, the movie ends. Who knows what we'd find there?
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