Who is Jonathan Glazer, UK director wowing Cannes?
CANNES: Jonathan Glazer has made just a handful of films in 20 years, but each has been unique, drawing highly memorable performances from stars such as Nicole Kidman and Ben Kingsley.
A decade on from his last film, “Under the Skin”, the ultra-bizarre alien flick starring Scarlet Johansson, the enigmatic filmmaker is competing at the Cannes film Festival with Holocaust drama “A Zone of Interest” that has scored laudatory reviews. Here’s a quick summary of the man and his work: - Ads and music videos — London-born Glazer, 58, began in the theatre before moving into adverts and music videos.
He made memorable ads for Guinness, Stella Artois and Levi’s in the 1990s and several videos for Radiohead, as well as Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity” which won the MTV video of the year award in 1997. ‘Sexy Beast’ (2000): Glazer caused a sensation with his first film starring Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley, puting a bravura spin on the tired British gangster genre with the sort of searing images that characterised his ads and music videos. It gave the world one of most unforgetably insane characters ever commited to celluloid in Kingsley’s motor-mouthed psycho
Don Logan — as distant as it’s possible to be from his best-known role as Gandhi — earning the actor an Oscar nomination. ‘Birth’ (2004): Radically switching genres, Glazer turned next to this eerie New York tale about a widow (Nicole Kidman) confronted by a 10-year-old who claims to be her reincarnated dead husband. The film confounded and scandalised critics at the time and was booed at its Venice film Festival premiere, with many disturbed by the sexual overtones of the central relationship, but its reputation has grown over the years and earned comparisons with legendary director Stanley Kubrick. ‘Under the Skin’ (2013): Glazer’s mysterious sci-fi set in a remote coastal Scotish town drew a stand-out performance from Scarlet Johansson, playing an alien in human form who roams the beaches and streets, picking up random men and luring them to an abandoned house.
Mixing highly stylised abstract scenes with grity Glasgow realism, Glazer’s film was both baffling and mesmerising, but this time the critics were won over, with the film topping multiple film-of-the-year lists. ‘The Zone of Interest’ (2023): Ater a decade in which he only made a couple of short films, Glazer has returned with another unique offering — looking at the disturbing ordinary private life of a Nazi officer at the Auschwitz concentration camp. It never shows the horrors of the camp directly, but the audience knows full well what the background noises — trains, incinerators, gunshots and screams — signify. Critics have been near-unanimous in their praise.
The awful reality of Auschwitz seen from the other side of the wall, where the flowers grow and children play, is captured in Jonathan Glazer’s long-awaited new film, “The Zone of Interest”, which premiered Friday at Cannes.
The horror of Auschwitz “is just bearing down on every pixel of every shot, in sound and how we interpret that sound... It affects everything but them”, Glazer told AFP.
The 58-year-old director’s fourth film focuses on the family of Rudolf Hoss, the longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz camp who lived a stone’s throw away. While the screams and gunshots are audible from their beautiful garden, the family carries on with their life as though nothing were amiss. Glazer, who is Jewish, wanted to explore how it was possible to live with the horror on their doorstep. “Would it be possible to sleep? Could you sleep? What happens if you close the curtains and you wear earplugs, could you do that?
“Everything had to be very carefully calibrated to feel that it was always there, this ever-present, monstrous machinery,” he told AFP.
The disturbing film is all the more uncomfortable to watch as it is shot in a realist style, with natural lighting and none of the frills or glossy aesthetic typical to a period drama.