Lola On Film

It is a significant risk to dedicate a decade of one’s life on a conceptual film on the diabolical mechanics of the Holocaust, then craft it to appear as meticulously chilling and banal as its architects and executioners were, in a filmic frame that is rigorously detached, almost postcard-like — and allow that point to sink into the cortex of the viewer, via the agency of sound, slowly and irreversibly, denying them any visual pleasure in the highly aestheticised proceedings.

Writer/director Jonathan Glazer is precisely that kind of courageous artist.

His Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest (2023) (Best International Feature) is based on the eponymous 2014 novel by Martin Amis, presenting the horrors of the Shoah from the perspective of its perpetrators. Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and his well-manicured family, live right on the other side of the barbed wire (the zone of interest from the title). His wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) is a dedicated housewife, enjoying every minute of her beautiful, smoothly run home environment, and the status her advantageous marriage affords her. In between tending to the roses, fussing over her five children, and presenting lavishly served family dinners, she casually tries on a mink coat brought to her from the camp, together with the regular dispatch of clothing taken from the soon-to-be murdered Jewish families, carefully applying the already used red lipstick she found left over in its pockets.

The colour red is a prominent metaphor in this film.

Her children play toy soldiers, and at night secretly marvel at the collection of gold-enamelled teeth in their possession. They go kayaking and swimming with dad in the nearby river, and wind up ingesting bone and ash from the crematorium that ended up in the waters. They are then rigorously rinsed from the soot, and encouraged to play on the beautifully tended lawn in front of the affluent Höss residence, adjacent to Auschwitz — oblivious to the constant background sound of cries, rifle fire, and dogs on the hunt for people trying to flee the camp.

Shot on location, at Auschwitz, it is the sound in The Zone of Interest, not the image or the words, that reveals reality. The award-winning sound design department, led by Johnnie Burn and Tarn Willers, created an atmosphere of dread and danger surrounding the artificial paradise of Höss’s villa and gardens, the bees and the ruffling of leaves intermixed with sounds of death and unimaginable suffering. The soundtrack by experimental musician Mica Levi makes the industrial scale mechanical horror of Auschwitz ring in the ears of the audiences long after viewing the film. Both Burn and Levi were Glazer’s associates for his equally highly innovative Under the Skin (2013).

The Höss family is tended by silent local Polish slave labour, painstakingly going about their work, yet the veneer of them being like any other domestic servants remains intact. Only when vexed does the mistress of the house threaten one of them with “becoming ash”. When Mrs. Höss’s husband receives orders for transfer to a different post, a promotion in fact, she digs her heels in — preferring to remain in Auschwitz, in the comfortable home they had built, in which, she tells her visiting mother — she is “queen”.

As Glazer discovered in his research, both Höss’s were of a working-class background, with strong bourgeois aspirations, and this aspect of their personal histories seems to play a pivotal role in their absolute moral degradation.

As much as Rudolph Höss hangs onto his career and standing in the National Socialist Party (and amongst the Nazi elite), while focused on facilitating an even more effective means of mass murder, so does his wife care to keep her position in the community of other officers’ wives, through negation and discipline, grasping with a steely hand to all her trophies and trimmings.

In one of the very few moments of dim awareness in the Höss family, Hedwig’s pragmatic mother (Imogen Kogge) wonders if an old Jewish employer of hers is now on the other side of the walls, and regrets not acquiring the curtains she admired while cleaning her house. Still, the older woman leaves in the morning, without a goodbye, after observing throughout the night the fires of the crematoria. She leaves a note to Hedwig, which her daughter reads, then throws into the stove. We do not hear what is said. But we can assume. Being so close to the actual smell of burning human flesh makes the spoils of war perhaps too real.

Friedel and Hüller are masterful in their depiction of the couple — the simplicity of their characters’ intellects and ambitions juxtaposed with the complexities of the inner mechanics of their emotional deadening, their absolute complicity in a machine that offers them a place ‘at the top’. Everything is taken at a surface level, the only way a dehumanisation on such scale could ever occur.

The tedious chit-chat Hedwig has with the officers’ wives, Rudolf’s almost bored reaction to being presented with a new type of gas chamber and crematoria to purchase, the routine domestic activity of the Höss family, all are depicted in savage detail. The documentary undertones of the film are most likely due to the interactions being highly historically accurate, as Glazer spent three long years researching every facet of information or witness account of the Hösses he could find.

There are almost no close-ups throughout the entire film, it has a surveillance feel to it — achieved via the small, static cameras concealed in the house and garden. With its natural light, we are given a distinct 360° fishbowl perspective, one of a stage, a dollhouse, surrounded by a wall of sound. As the filmmaker stated in the NYFF cast interview — his idea was to keep the camp prisoners “out of sight, but never out of mind”, stripping away any cinematic devices that would aid in glamourising a subject or delving deeper into their psychological depths beyond their dehumanising behaviour.

But, Glazer does not allow for this density of sheer inner vacant horror, the ordinary emptiness that Hannah Arendt so famously coined “the banality of evil”, to fully overtake us — offering us light in the pitch-black scenery, a goodness in the shape the luminous night-vision of Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk (Julia Polaczek), a young girl, and Polish resistance fighter, who secretly left food for prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and relayed messages for them. The beauty of her soul and deeds defying the overwhelming darkness.

The film ends with a present day Auschwitz as Memorial, following two cleaning staff busy in maintaining the museum grounds — all the lives brutally taken represented in the personal belongings that the slaughtered men, women, and children had left behind, ones that did not hold monetary interest to their murderers. These assembled pieces of tapestries of so many lives speak of their presence. History always has the last say, when enough time has passed.

In a brilliantly intersected déjà vu moment, when descending a staircase, Höss, in the 1940s, is also given a brief vision of the future — a glimpse into his own legacy.

“For me, this is not a film about the past.” says Glazer in his pre-UK-release interview for The Guardian, “it’s trying to be about now, and about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims.”

In creating a film that speaks directly to the very concept of genocide — the killing of not individuals, but an entire people, the fact that not a single Jewish person appears in the film, except in the backdrop of distorted sound, becomes even more significant. This was the kind of Germany Hitler had envisioned.

Everything can be manipulated, the director clearly points out, but not all can be silenced.

The Zone Of Interest is not only a cinematic masterpiece. The sounds of the wheels of humanity’s murder machine echo, linger, and screech to this day.

★★★★★

Author: © Milana Vujkov