‘The Zone Of Interest Review: Jonathan Glazers Profoundly Chilling Dramatic Portrait Of A Nazi Family Living Right Next Door To Auschwitz
Among the thousands of dramatic films dedicated to the Holocaust, there are few that recall or even attempt to recall the experience of what happened in the concentration camps. that is understood. The horror of this experience is forbidden and somehow unimaginable. But there are a few films like Schindler's List, Son of Saul and The Gray Zone that deal with these horrors clearly and indelibly. We can now add Jonathan Glazer's region of interest to this list.
It's a wonderful film - bright and deep, contemplative and fascinating, illuminating the darkness of humanity and examining it under a microscope. In a sense, this is a film that plays with our voyeurism, our curiosity to see the unseen. And yet he does it with great originality. The "area of interest" is not a picture of the victims of the Holocaust. This is the image of evil. Above each moment, however, is the terror of a human being shot and buried at the same time. One of the prominent themes of the film is the division of the crime into several parts.
At the beginning, the title remains on the screen and we hear Mika Levi's incredibly creepy music. The chorus of "Rosemary's Baby" seems to play backwards with a scream, and is that just our imaginations, or is it somehow connected to the sound of a stylized human scream? The film then switches to a frame: a sloping meadow by the lake, drenched in sunlight, surrounded by families with children and a few men in bathing suits. Everything seems perfectly happy and "normal" until he encounters an unfamiliar element: a man's haircut - a head shaved at the back and sides, with long hair as dark as an oil stain, like an animal smeared with oil on top of it.
This man is German SS officer Rudolf Hess (Christian Friedel). In most of our "areas of interest," we observe him and his family in their home, filled with ornate rooms in a large two-story box-like building that resembles a comfortable, well-appointed quinto of bourgeois privilege. The property has greenhouses, a large garden with a small pond and rows of growing gardens along the adjacent walls. But a 12-meter wall stopped us. Above it are three rows of barbed wire, supported by twisted poles with symbolic protrusions. We know this curve: this is the barbed wire of a concentration camp. The house stood just outside the walls of Auschwitz, the Polish death factory that began killing and burning most of its Jewish victims in August 1941.
As we know, Höss was not just a camp person. He was the leader who not only ran Auschwitz, but also designed and implemented the killing machines there, which were later exported to the Nazi concentration camps. It all depends on history. Set in Auschwitz and heavily adapted from Martin Amis' 2014 novel, "Field of Interest" tells the true identity story of Rudolf Hossen and his family. However, Glazer does not dramatize the book in a traditional way. This gives us an extended scene—a really long static—in which we see the characters going about their lives, as if we were watching them on a surveillance camera directed by Stanley Kubrick. A lot of what happens is my house and every day: eating, reading bedtime stories, sitting in the garden. The Höss family lived a pampered lifestyle, supported by a team of housekeepers, and the house had an air of farm comfort.
Although it was a farm located next to the cemetery. But nobody talks about it, points to it, or maybe even thinks about it. So everything in this movie is full of fantasy. In other words, what happened in the camp was not completely hidden. We can see rows of stone barracks lining the walls. In addition, we heard sounds in the distance: the fugitive sound of gunfire, the faint sounds of prisoners screaming in terror, the muffled screams of German soldiers, and behind it all a low, endless sound. . The sound of fire coming from the furnace is what we see from a distance, like the flames and smoke from the chimneys of Auschwitz. It's okay, but it happened... there . outside the walls out of mind By considering the "area of interest," you feel the full meaning of the term "area of concentration." All killing and death is suppressed, hidden and removed from the world.
The whole conceptual design of the "region of interest" is quite challenging. When I see how the Höss family runs their business, I think we interact in two ways at once. We are terrified that they don't feel it, and it gives us goosebumps. At the same time, there is their extreme denial—they are in a middle-class bubble, like a suburban American family in the 1950s—that metaphorically confuses aspects of our experience. I'm not saying we're 'Nazi-like' by any means, but we also live with an element of denial: terror and brutality around the world, and injustices that may soon be in our own backyard. Even Rudolf Huss did not deny this: he was a monster disguised as an ordinary citizen. There is a still scene as he hears and approves the engineers' plans for a new and streamlined crematorium.
The family is presented in a satirical and almost monthly way at times, mainly because the film focuses on the evil bullying of Rudolf's wife Hedwig and the evil consumerism played with great authenticity by "Tony" star Sandra Höller. Erdmann.” He turns Hedwig into an old-school wife and mother, oblivious to everything outside of her home until that very existence is threatened, and flares up with a fury worthy of Carmela Soprano. We see that the husband's ideas are not Nazis. as separated from him as we thought.
This threat gives the film the dramatic boost it needs. Hosse learns that the regime plans to replace him with a new leader. Preparing the transfer. He has been working for almost four years and it is time for a change. But what will happen to his family's lifestyle? He was afraid to tell Hedwig, and her reaction suggested that he might like this way of life more than she did. (Meanwhile, he seems to love his horse more than Hedwig.) Rudolph certainly makes a good soldier (he is a Nazi, after all), but the film's particularly poignant design element is his portrayal. The Nazi mentality as an institutional mentality. Feelings change like some middle management. And Hedwig married a company in her own way.
Jonathan Glazer has had an incredible career that I'm really excited about. He started in music videos and at the age of 23 he made his first feature film, Sexy Beast (2000), which is perhaps one of the greatest gangster films ever made. But then The Opaque Birth (2004) and then Under the Skin (2013), a sci-fi thriller starring Scarlett Johansson as an otherworldly predator, was something I could do, but it was necessary and loving. activated After ordering the beginning of the list, this film was a big blur for me. On one level, I expected Glazer to return to Accessibility in Sexy Beast, but Zone of Interest is the work of Glazer, a great conceptual poet—and, I must say, a man of faith. His performance in this movie is awesome. It makes the sphere of concentration (even if we only get to enter it once) real enough to haunt your dreams.
Christian Friedel plays Höss as a man who has fully exposed himself, and that is why he can do what he does. At a meeting of a council of Nazi officers, we discussed a plan to hasten the Final Solution by expelling 700,000 Jews from Hungary. The presentation of this movie is so realistic that it burns us. And Höss became such a good Nazi that he won the battle for his company. He returned to work because he found the man he replaced unsuitable for the job; Maybe he doesn't feel like it. But there is a scene near the end (inspired by the end of the documentary The Act of Killing) when Höss walks down the stairs and we see everything he brought inside. But what the film shows us is the humanity of evil.
