Holocaust drama is two films in one
I initially refused to see “The Zone of Interest,” the utterly stunning Oscar-winning film about the family life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, filmed in his house, re-created just beside the actual concentration camp.
How could anything new be said about the worst depths humans can reach? Why try? I often wonder if interest in Nazi war crimes has become unhealthily morbid, like a screaming roller-coaster ride, a safe terror that degrades the dead.
But the film, by British director Jonathan Glazer, who is Jewish, manages to do the impossible, find a fresh angle on genocide. Why don’t we look at life from the Nazi point of view? It might be instructive.
On one side of the wall, we have, as Höss listed in a fetid and self-justifying memoir before he was hanged, the dead and near-dead — Jews, “gypsies,” political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and lesbians — being shot, hanged, eviscerated by dogs, gassed, cremated or worked to death.
A few metres away, we have Höss’s house and garden, a happy Nazi villa with wife Hedwig and five children basking in the luxury of servants, flower garden, pool and a nearby river for swimming, a tidy enclave for these oafish aspirational Auschwitz suburbanites.
But look more closely. A gardener scatters human ashes on a flower border. Höss, swimming with the children, finds a human jawbone in the river and hustles them home. And there’s always a soundtrack of shouts, shots, clangs and screams, with a backdrop of periodic flames and black smoke.
“There are, in effect, two films,” Glazer has said. “The one you see, and the one you hear.”
The soundtrack is the star of the film: periodically there is a terrible sound like a glug, a sucking sputum sound, a deep inhuman gargle. Something is retching. Is it human? The screen turns all-black or allred.
When Hedwig turns her baby’s face downward to smell a dahlia, the blossom becomes distorted, something malign. Mundane objects become sinister: Hedwig’s new fur coat; the lipstick she finds in the pocket; the lingerie the terrorized housemaids are allowed to scavenge from a pile on the kitchen table. Where are the women who owned them? Are they already alkaline bone meal?
The film’s power lies in adjacency. A superficially pleasant life runs day by day next door to pure horror, which goes deliberately unacknowledged. Many people in many countries live this way now, the rich walled off from the distasteful sight of the poor, one race annihilating the other, side by side. Genocide is almost habitual.
We know this. We are advised not to comment on the horror of simultaneity, easy pleasant lives being lived a wire fence away from shortened, miserable lives, Eros vs. Thanatos.
Glazer’s Oscar speech referred to the Israeli annihilation of Gaza — “We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people” — sparked both praise and disagreement.
As Glazer has correctly said, “These things are on the rise again with the growth of right-wing populism everywhere. The road that so many people took is a few steps away. It is always just a few steps away.”
Steven Spielberg, who makes big, obvious films, didn’t object to the speech.
And he loved the elliptical “The Zone of Interest.”
CNN hired a reviewer, Peter Rutland, a politics professor, who didn’t. In a review so abnormally clueless that it will long be treasured by fans of film and comedy, he berated Glazer for making a Holocaust film about household pets and gardening in which “we never see any Jews.”
As if Glazer had forgotten. They’re over there, Peter, behind the wall. You can hear them screaming. That’s the point.