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‘The Zone of Interest’ brings Auschwitz to Cannes: Jonathan Glazer rocks the festival with his most uncomfortable film

Three and a half minutes of black screen bathed in the dark music of Mica Levi, in his magnificent new collaboration with Jonathan Glazer after under the skin (2013), welcome The Zone of Interest, preparing the public for what will be a immersive sensory experience in some of the most unbearable corners of human history from a particularly uncomfortable perspective: the Daily life in the house of the commandant of a Nazi death camp.

Glazer has taken the title and setting of The Zone of Interest, the novel of the same name by Martin Amis which also takes place in a concentration camp, but instead of keeping its fictional characters, it has been set in the real case of one of the scariest Nazi officers. Specifically, of Rudolf Hoss, lieutenant colonel of the SS and commandant of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, whose resume is estimated to have been responsible for the extermination of 2.5 million people.

As if that weren’t terrible enough, in the eyes of Hoss and his superiors, that chilling figure only indicated that he was efficient at his job. That tremendous banality of absolute evil is the facet that interests Glazer, with the book of Hannah Arendt on the nightstand. british director has performed a rigorous and hypercalibrated reconstruction of the daily life of Hoss and his family in the house next to the field where the machinery for reaping human lives was kept at full capacity.

A reality show in Auschwitz

Glazer’s formal device imposes itself monolithically and implacably: usually in long shots with a static camera, with angles reminiscent of security videos or footage from any coexistence reality show, and shows scenes of home life of the Hoss holding a cold distancing as mechanical in the assembly of shots as the design of the gas chambers designed to achieve its maximum effectiveness within a capitalist rationality.

The approach when recording the daily life of the inhabitants in this kind of microcosm within absolute evil, with its routines, house jobs and oppressive hierarchy (the numerous domestic servants are made up of local girls with Jewish relatives) It is reminiscent of other historical recreation projects between cinema and performance like the monumental the commune, of Peter Watkins, or, above all, the megalomaniac project DAU, of Ilya Khrzhanovskiy; though here, Glazer stays staunchly away from his characters and hasn’t gone berserk to our knowledge.

Sandra HĂ¼ller (Toni Erdman) plays Hedwig, Hoss’s wife and mother of his five children, who dedicates herself to ordering domestic servants to maintain the house and designing an extraordinary garden in what she considers his particular arcade. There is only the small annoying detail of the noises of the killing machinery, of course. A persistent and maddening background soundtrack composed of machinery, shots and screams of fear that envelops the entire footage, just as the dense smoke coming from the cremation ovens stains the sky.

That is the space that Glazer gives to horror. An out of visual field of unbearable sound presence and through trivial details: watchtowers cutting out the horizon, blood-stained boots, dialogues about production figures and results that immediately lead us to The human question of Nicolas Klotz… If individual scenes were taken, ignoring the context, they could be from a family drama where the father tries to avoid a transfer within the company because of how comfortable he is in his position.

So simple and bleak how that. A handful of nocturnal sequences that stray substantially from the rest of the formal apparatus or a certain crack between recreation and non-fiction are the only brief deviations from a proposal that remains firm and undaunted, aware that the horror that beats in each of his images It’s more than enough to make you cringe.

DATA SHEET

Poster for 'The Zone of Interest' in Cannes

  • Director:

    Jonathan Glazer


  • Gender:

    Historical drama


  • Country:

    United Kingdom, Poland, USA


  • Synopsis:

    Nazi officer Rudolf Höss has become the best of his job: commandant of the Auschwitz labor and extermination camp.

  • Script: Jonathan Glazer
    ​
    Cast: Sandra HĂ¼ller, Christian Friedel, Ralph Herforth, Max Beck
    ​
    ​Duration: 105 minutes
    ​
    Premiere: 2023

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