A senior civil servant leads a comfortable existence with his wife and their five children. Provided by the State, their residence is spacious and opulent. At the rear of the property, vast gardens display lush colors and sweet scents. The picture would be bucolic if this green Eden were not flanked by a high dark wall from which screams and gunshots can be heard. And this black smoke which obscures the skies at regular intervals… It’s because the senior official in question runs a concentration camp. He is the protagonist of The Zone of Interest (The area of interest), in which Jonathan Glazer evokes, with terrifying formal mastery, all the detachment that humans are capable of in times of genocide.
Winner of the Grand Prix and the International Critics Prize at Cannes, The Zone of Interest is freely adapted from a novel by Martin Amis. In his screenplay, Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) in this case only retained one of the three main characters.
Rather than sticking to the book’s fictional camp director, however, Glazer decided to go to the source by using the real historical figure who inspired the character: Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel; Babylon Berlin), who was at the head of the Auschwitz camp, where the action of the film is set. In doing so, Glazer brings to the fore the partner of Commander Höss, Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller; Anatomy of a fall). In this, the film embraces their respective perspectives almost equally.
This filmmaker’s desire to get closer, within the framework of a feature-length fiction film, to historical truth, is eloquent. This added authenticity adds to the discomfort that the film generates, on purpose. Thus the daily life of these Nazis is depicted in all its bourgeois banality, while just a few meters away, Jewish people are exterminated.
Except that, and this is diabolically clever on Glazer’s part, we never venture to that side of the wall; we are never confronted with horror. This horror remains abstract: sounds, at most (brilliant sound design). With this bias, the director somehow places the audience in the same compartmentalized position as the characters, who go about their routine without qualms.
However, the contrast between the relative insignificance that we see among the Höss and the seriousness of what we know is happening off-camera, outside of this “zone of interest” precisely, generates unease deep. That’s the point.
A nagging question
Indeed, this overwhelming feeling forces painful reflection. Which ? As producer Jim Wilson explained during a recent virtual conference at which The duty was able to witness, the question the film asks is simple: “How much are we like these ordinary people?” »
Hence Jonathan Glazer’s choice to stick resolutely to “the banality of evil”, to evoke Hannah Arendt’s theory. So here is Rudolf Höss reviewing the statistics of a new crematorium, whose “increased efficiency” will make it look good to his superiors. And the mistress of the room (“self-proclaimed queen of Auschwitz”) delightedly put on the furs and jewelry taken from Jewish inmates…
In this regard, the film also has things to say about materialism and, by extension, capitalism. Because according to Hedwig, all this luxury and this rural existence is only justice: as she reminds her husband, this is the realization of their dream (she is so keen on it that she refuses to follow Rudolf when the latter is promoted in Berlin). Faced with her placid happiness (made almost vaporous by the photo direction of Łukasz Żal), we understand with horror that, for Hedwig, those who are tortured and executed in the neighboring buildings are strictly speaking obstacles to this “dream.” “.
So much pettiness is despicable, but again the question comes back, nagging: “How much are we like these ordinary people?” »
Content and form in tune
On the technical side, The Zone of Interest is undoubtedly the most accomplished work of Jonathan Glazer, who made very few films – only four films in more than twenty years.
Here, the filmmaker recommends the medium shot and the wide shot. The approach is in tune with the detachment displayed by the characters: these terribly ordinary people. A difficult, immense, essential film.