“THE ZONE OF INTEREST” My rating: B+ (In theaters)
105 minutes | MPAA ratin: PG-13
In its own perverted way, Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” is a sick parody of that heartwarming musical “Meet Me In St. Louis.”
Both films are about families living idyllic and comfortable lives, and what happens when the father of the clan must for his job relocate to another city.
What makes Glazer’s film so deeply twisted is that the family in question is that of Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of the notorious Auschwitz death camp.
When we first encounter the Hoss family they are picnicking on a sun-dappled hillside beside a beautiful river or lake. They swim, bask in the sun. Reduced to their old-fashioned bathing outfits, there’s no way of knowing that Poppa is a high-ranking Nazi officer.
They return to their home, a comfortable modernist abode with a greenhouse and a huge walled-in garden with its own swimming pool.
As we observe the mundane day-to-day life of Rudolf (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller, an Oscar nominee this year for “Anatomy of a Fall”) and their brood, little ripples of uneasiness creep in.
Occasionally we can hear gunshots. A distant smokestack belches black clouds. And now and then we can see over the wall or in the gap between buildings the familiar shape of the tower over the camp’s main gate.
Talk about the banality of evil!
Sandra Huller
Rudolf goes to work each morning like any other breadwinner…only usually in a uniform of the Reich. He comes home for lunch. He reads his children bedtime stories.
We never actually see what goes on beyond the wall, but in one painfully haunting scene Rudolf sits down in his study to discuss an expansion of the camp with a couple of architect/engineers from Berlin. They talk about product flow and increased production without ever acknowledging that their job is to kill their fellow human beings as efficiently as possible.
Meanwhile Mother Hedwig goes about her business of making the perfect home. She has help…every now and then someone arrives from the camp with a cart full of clothing, jewelry and household objects for Hedwig to pick from. We don’t need to be told that these were confiscated from Jews marching to their deaths.
For that matter, Hedwig has several quietly efficient and utterly deferential young women working as maids and cooks. One can only assume that they are inmates given a reprieve to serve their Teutonic masters.
As written by Glazer (“Under the Skin”) from Martin Amis’ novel, “The Zone of Interest” is less about plot than dispassionate observation. Most of what unfolds is utterly commonplace: Hedwig’s mother comes for a visit. Hedwig plans improvements for the garden. Rudolf enjoys an after-dinner smoke on the porch as the sun goes down.
Only late in the film does a real crisis develop: Rudolf is to be transferred and Hedwig puts her foot down. She loves her home and refuses to move after all she’s done to make this the perfect place to raise their kids.
The unspoken subject of “The Zone of Interest” is the human capacity to compartmentalize, to spend evenings contentedly nurturing one’s children and to spend days murdering the children of others.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 