The most disturbing drama I’ve ever seen
A portrait of Nazis playing happy families is one of two leading Oscar contenders worth watching this week
The Zone Of Interest
(12A, 105 mins)
Verdict: Chilling and compelling ★★★★★
American Fiction (15, 117 mins)
Verdict: Hard to put down ★★★★☆
THE COMPLAINT that there’s ‘ nothing worth going to the cinema for’ is one I hear a lot, and it’s often hard to argue with, but it holds no water at all this week as we welcome two of the contenders for Best Picture in next month’s Academy Awards.
I don’t think either will be anointed with the Oscar, which, as they say in sporting circles, is Oppenheimer’s to lose. But both would be worthy winners, especially The Zone Of Interest, a uniquely disturbing drama about the Holocaust.
Unique, because the mass extermination of the Jews, Hitler’s abhorrent ‘Final Solution’, is presented as a glowering but mostly distant backdrop, while an ostensibly wholesome tale of family life unfolds in the foreground.
Set in 1943, the film focuses on the domestic lifestyle of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel), his materialistic wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller), and their five children. They live in considerable comfort just over the wall from the concentration camp he runs with icy efficiency.
After a hard day’s work supervising mass murder, Hoss goes home to the same rituals as all loving parents, tucking up his kids at bedtime and reading them stories, while behind him the crematoria chimneys roar. It is as chilling a drama as I have ever seen, yet utterly compelling.
Although a German-language film, very loosely based on the late Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of the same title, The Zone Of Interest is written and directed by an Englishman, the Oscar-nominated Jonathan Glazer. It is only his fourth feature in 24 years. But added to the other three — Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004), and Under the Skin (2013) — it compounds his status as one of our most singular film-makers.
I can’t call this his most singular film, given that Under The Skin featured Scarlett Johansson as a man-eating alien in Glasgow. But it’s the most unsettling.
And while Friedel and especially Huller (another Oscar nominee) both give extraordinary performances, in a way the most unnerving character is Hedwig’s matronly mother Linna (Imogen Kogge), who arrives to stay positively bursting with pride at the rich life her daughter has created for herself: the lovely home, the handsome vegetable garden.
Hedwig tells her that ‘Rudi’ calls her ‘the Queen of Auschwitz’. Linna beams — ‘you really have landed on your feet, my child’ — and wonders idly whether the Jewish woman she used to clean for might be on the other side of the big wall? She adds that, frustratingly, she was outbid for the woman’s curtains at a street auction. We can only guess at the intense suffering and despair implied by her casual regret.
There is, however, a blot on the Hosses’ landscape. It is not, of course, the train steaming in to deliver more of Europe’s Jews to the gas chambers. It is that Rudolf’s superiors want to transfer him. And Hedwig, more attached to their lifestyle than to him, hates the idea of leaving. So off he goes to Berlin to argue his case and placate his wife.
The paradox of this remarkable film is that its extraordinariness lies in its depiction of normality. It embodies, spellbindingly, what the philosopher Hannah Arendt was getting at when she wrote about ‘the banality of evil’.
■ IN ITS very different way, American Fiction is just as absorbing, and contains another mighty performance. Jeffrey Wright, too, is up for an Oscar.
He plays world-weary Thelonious ‘ Monk’ Ellison, an African-American professor who can’t find anyone willing to publish his cerebral new book.
Meanwhile, to his disgust, another black author, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), is having huge success with what he considers a cheap novel stuffed with racial stereotypes and ‘ghetto speak’.
So he dashes off a wild parody, intended to send up everything he hates about white perceptions of black people. But guess what? It becomes a huge hit, and his agent, to keep interest ignited and the money rolling in, persuades him to adopt a fake identity, pretending the book was actually written by Stagg R. Leigh, a jive-talking escaped convict on the run.
Adapted from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, American Fiction reminded me strongly both of The Producers (1967) and Tootsie (1982), which is never a bad thing. But, while there are some hilarious moments, it is a darker film than either.
It skewers beautifully the shallowness of the publishing industry, but it’s a keenly observed race satire too.
My only gripe is that it veers off too often into an exploration of Monk’s complex family dynamics, which didn’t interest me as much.
But Cord Jefferson, a TV writer who worked on the hit drama Succession and here makes his silverscreen debut as writer- director, has crafted a terrific movie.
■ Both films are in cinemas now.