Review: Holocaust Drama ‘The Zone Of Interest Is A Best Picture Contender At Sundays Golden Globes

I've seen them all, but the hardest to watch (and the hardest to forget) is Jonathan Glasser's Holocaust reverse drama Zone of Interest, which won the Grand Prix and the Fipreski Award at the Festival of Film at Cannes earlier to be nominated for a Globe. . For Best Drama, Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Song.

The harrowing film, based on the 2014 novel of the same name by British author Martin Amis, takes place in German-occupied Poland in 1943, where Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his lover Hedwig are raising their five children Arya in a luxurious house. Street. Near the walls of the concentration camp.

In many ways, the film is the antithesis of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), which filled us with pathos. It also differs from Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful (1997) and Taika Waititi's satirical comedy Jojo Rabbit (2019). It's closer to Laszlo Nemes' Son of Saul (2015), which hides behind-the-scenes atrocities but also takes place inside a concentration camp.

Purposely, the "zone of interest" never entered the field during the actual Holocaust. Instead, we watch patiently as Commander Hoss (Christian Friedel, 13 minutes) holds several Nazi meetings specifically to discuss the "final solution" of gassing millions of Jews. We also see his wife Hedwig (Globe-nominated Anatomy of a Fall star Sandra Hüller) cooking, hanging laundry, and tending to their garden.

At times, the pace of this mundane work rivals that of Chantal Akerman's Jean Dillman (1975), challenging our attention to the observation of everyday life. But that's the point: how many willfully ignorant people can go about their daily business while an atrocity happens next door. In the distance muffled gunshots, barking dogs and the terrible screams of the Jews are heard. Even Hedwig's mother can't stand the smell and ends the tour early.

Breaking the monotony is a recurring infrared scene in which a Polish neighbor sneaks out at night to hide leftover food for the prisoners, though it's sadly more of a creative interlude than anything coherently connected to the narrative. Here we are visually reminded of Glazer's weird sci-fi thriller Under the Skin (2013), in which Scarlett Johansson plays an alien creature who lures men to liquid death.

In "Zone of Interest," Glasser's greatest directorial effort to date ends with a masterful cut as caretakers clear the field, which has since been converted into a Holocaust museum. We see them sweeping the floors and dusting the shop windows with piles of shoes that are part of the millions of Jewish victims.

Nothing compares to the documentary footage of Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1956) or Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), but as a narrative film, Zone of Interest can do what those films cannot: namely, be Nazi. officer who is as silent as the genocidal dictator in The Act of Killing (2012). After the war, Hoss was convicted by the Supreme National Court of Poland and hanged on April 16, 1947.

That strong ending alone makes Zone of Interest a worthy contender for best picture drama at Sunday's Golden Globes, though it's unlikely to best Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon Martin. The Past Lives of Scorsese and Celine Gunn. However, it's a better movie than Bradley Cooper's The Master and Justin Triet's Anatomy of a Fall, so it's currently my fourth favorite movie.

It has a better chance of winning in the Best Non-English Film category, with the odds tipping Anatomy of a Fall (France), but I'm rooting for Past Lives (US/Korea). The category includes Aki Kaurismäki's romantic comedy Fallen Leaves (Finland), Matteo Garone's drama I Am Captain (Italy) and JA Bayona's survival story The Snow Society (Spain), which premieres on Netflix this weekend. If you want to achieve

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