Film review

  • The Zone of Interest

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jonathan Glazer (2023)

    Martin Amis’s 2014 novel The Zone of Interest takes its name from the Nazis’ euphemistic term for Auschwitz and its environs.  It makes sense that Jonathan Glazer uses this title – dispassionate understatement is essential to his film’s shock tactics – but Glazer, if Wikipedia’s summary of the novel is to be believed, hasn’t retained much more of Amis’s source material, in terms of either plot or even character names.  In the novel, the Auschwitz camp commandant and his wife may be based on real individuals but are called Paul and Hannah Doll.  Glazer dispenses with pseudonyms:  his protagonists are Rudolf Höss, Auschwitz’s longest-serving commandant (from May 1940 to November 1943 and from May 1944 to January 1945), and his wife Hedwig.  Glazer announces the grimness and gravity of his subject matter from the start.  The film’s title appears in white characters on a black screen and stays there for what feels like several minutes.  The four words are accompanied by a combination of musical and non-musical sounds the more disturbing for being, as yet, uninterpretable.

    The first shot in the narrative proper is also held for some time but the image is tonally quite different from the lead-in to it.  Glazer shows a group of grown-ups and children in swimming costumes beside a lake; the water is calm, the sky blue with small white clouds.  The soundtrack changes, too, except in one respect.  In the interstices of the prologue’s loud discordance you could just about make out snatches of birdsong.  Now the sounds of birds in the trees near the lake are as audible as the chatter of the people on the screen, who are closer to the water’s edge and further away from the camera.  This long shot is a sign of things to come.  Glazer and his cinematographer, Łukasz Żal, are sparing with close-ups throughout, as if to acknowledge that it’s hard to get near to – impossible to comprehend – the characters in the film.

    The first half hour or so of The Zone of Interest (which runs 105 minutes all told) comprises almost plotless description of the home life of the Höss family, who were at the centre of that lakeside gathering.  Rudolf (Christian Friedel), Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their five children have a spacious home with a staff that, under Hedwig’s strict supervision, keeps it spotless.  Hedwig also takes pleasure in the large, well-tended garden.  On a sunny morning, she carries her youngest child, still a babe in arms, along the flower beds, holding the baby over the flowers to get a scent of phlox, a closer look at a ladybird.  Everything in the garden is lovely – or will be once the ivy growing has covered more of the high, abutting wall of the concentration camp.  When Hedwig’s mother, Linna (Imogen Kogge), arrives on a visit, her proud daughter conducts Linna on a tour of the grounds and mentions that ‘the Jews are over the wall’.  That side of the wall is mostly out of bounds to Glazer’s camera except for shots of the Auschwitz guard tower and smoke in the sky.

    Glazer’s approach makes it inevitable that much of The Zone of Interest consists of repeated illustrations of the same point – and nearly inevitable that plenty of reviewers will use ‘the banality of evil’ as a label for what the film sets out to demonstrate.  Watching (just a couple of years ago) a documentary about the Adolf Eichmann trial left me puzzled as never before by Hannah Arendt’s notorious phrase.  Enclosed in bulletproof glass in the dock of the Jerusalem courtroom, Eichmann came across as more vigorously nasty than the frighteningly shallow bureaucrat that Arendt saw and heard; especially when he spoke, the defendant evinced savage contempt for the trial, the prosecutors and witnesses speaking on behalf of the huge numbers of people whose deaths he had organised.  But questionable as Arendt’s term (and lazy as wheeling it out again) may be, it’s hardly inaccurate in relation to Glazer’s film, although Jonathan Romney, writing in Sight and Sound (Winter 2023), does well to move beyond it to ‘the domesticity of evil’.  At one point Glazer cross-cuts between conversations in different parts of the Höss house.  In one room, Rudolf is in discussion with the designers of a new, more streamlined crematorium system.  In a different room, Hedwig serves coffee to the wives of other SS officers.  The women’s anti-semitism, though casual and, compared with the men’s conversation, trivial, is no easier to listen to.

    The film’s timeframe extends from mid-1943 to early 1944; the action begins, in other words, a few months after the end of the Battle of Stalingrad.  In keeping with Glazer’s central idea, the crisis that he eventually introduces is particular to the Höss family rather than a reflection of Germany’s declining hopes of winning World War II.  Rudolf’s successful career has meant that he and Hedwig have done very well for themselves.  When he’s promoted to the role of deputy inspector for all German concentration camps (‘seeing where improvements can be made – their yield, that kind of thing’), the appointment entails relocating to Oranienburg, near Berlin, and thus threatens to destroy the home life that he and his wife have painstakingly built for the family.  Rudolf hesitates for several days before putting Hedwig in the picture, during a garden party that the couple is hosting.  This viewer shared her astonishment that he chooses such a moment to break the news:  given the narrative’s tempo and uneventfulness up to this point, the timing of the revelation and the row that instantly erupts between the Hösses feel artificially melodramatic.

    Yet they’re also a means to an end both dramatically effective and quickly realised.  Rudolf, who tries to slip his bombshell into small talk about a pair of sandals that may have been left by the lake, escapes his wife’s fury by going to look for these.  She soon follows:  Glazer shows her walking down a road, past camp buildings reduced to background to the image of Hedwig, who is on the warpath but thinking hard.  By the time she reaches the landing stage, where Rudolf has found the missing sandals, she has worked out what to say to her husband:  of course he must accept the new posting but on condition that she and the children stay put.  A snatch of earlier conversation with her mother suggests that Hedwig’s social origins are humble:  her remark about the ‘Jews … over the wall’ gets Linna wondering if they might include a wealthy woman she used to clean for.  (Linna rattles on resentfully about the woman:  ‘She was the one who had the book readings … Bolshevik stuff, Jewish stuff … And I got outbid on her curtains at the street auction.  Her, opposite, she got them – I loved those curtains…’)  The daughter has attained a standard of living beyond her mother’s and her own wildest dreams; Hedwig is determined not to let her hard work go to waste.  This strength of feeling is hardly banal but renders her blinkered priorities all the more shocking.  In the overall scheme of the film, such feeling involves the viewer at a relatively normal, human level:  part of what’s shocking is one’s realising a degree of sympathy with this benighted homemaker.

    Höss’s superiors agree to let his wife and children remain at Auschwitz after the new commandant, Arthur Liebehenschel (Sascha Maaz), arrives there but Glazer uses Rudolf’s promotion as a catalyst for showing fissures in  the domestic order and new examples of moral aberrance in the title location, as well as for moving beyond it to describe Höss’s work in Oranienburg.  Despite her anti-semitism, Hedwig’s mother can’t stand the crematorium flames at night and departs suddenly.  (She leaves a note of explanation for her daughter, who burns it.)  We’ve already seen the Hösses’ sons playing with toy soldiers and wearing Nazi armbands.  Now the older boy (Johann Karthaus) locks the younger (Luis Noah Witte) in a greenhouse then sits on the garden wall, imitating the sound of hissing gas.  We may well have taken a liking to the family’s friendly, skittering black dog and admired Rudolf’s bay mare (even if they bring to mind lines from Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’:  ‘… the dreadful martyrdom must run its course/Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot/Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree’); we’ll certainly have noticed that Höss and his wife share a bedroom but have single beds.  Now we see Rudolf, about to leave for Berlin, bid a much more heartfelt farewell to his mare than to his wife[1].  We also see a young female prisoner report to his office, where she prepares to undress; in the next sequence, he’s in the bathroom washing his genitals.  The Oranienburg sequences, in presenting the administrative efficiency of the Final Solution project, don’t exactly cover new ground but a smoothly-run committee meeting – complete with apologies for absence from two Sturmbannführer and a run-through of agenda items regarding ‘the Hungarian action’ – still makes the point strongly.

    Although splitting the action between two places doesn’t distract from or dilute Glazer’s theme, one small group of scenes within the ‘zone of interest’ does.  Shooting in thermal night vision, Glazer shows the after-dark routine of a young Polish girl (Julia Polaczek), who goes round Auschwitz work sites leaving partly-hidden apples for prisoners to eat.  On one occasion, she finds a hand-written sheet of music, written by a prisoner called Joseph Wulf.  The girl subsequently plays tentative notes from Wulf’s composition on a piano, while a recording of Wulf’s own voice reads the optimistic lyrics that he wrote along with the melody.  (Wulf reads in Yiddish:  most of the dialogue is, of course, German, with a few bits of Polish.)  According to Wikipedia, the girl:

    ‘ … is inspired by a woman named Alexandria, whom Glazer met during his research.  As a 12-year-old member of the Polish resistance, she used to cycle to the camp to leave apples for the starving prisoners.  As in the film, she discovered a piece of music written by a prisoner. The prisoner, named Joseph Wulf, survived the war.  Alexandria was 90 years old when she met Glazer and died shortly after.  The bike the film uses and the dress the actress wears both belonged to her.’

    It’s understandable that Glazer felt the need somehow to commemorate Alexandria but The Zone of Interest’s sudden lurch into Playing for Time territory[2] is forced – a hopeful, humanitarian interruption to the main narrative and hardly enough to raise audience spirits.

    Does Glazer also misjudge the sequencing of the final scenes, which deliver a kind of grotesque happy ending for Rudolf Höss?  The ‘Hungarian action’ refers to the transport to Auschwitz of hundreds of thousands of Hungary’s Jews.  Nazi top brass reckons Liebehenschel isn’t capable of handling such a large-scale operation but that Höss is:  he will therefore resume his former role as camp commandant.   In Berlin, Rudolf attends a grand party to mark this new phase in the genocide.  When he telephones Hedwig, she asks who attended the event; he says he didn’t really notice, preoccupied as he was with thoughts of whether it would be possible to gas people in the party venue because of the high ceilings there.  As he leaves his Oranienburg office and descends a staircase, Rudolf starts to retch.  Glazer then cuts to the present day and a group of Polish cleaners working in what is now the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim.  One of the cleaning women wipes the glass of a display case containing piles of children’s shoes; another does the same for a case exhibiting a mound of crutches and prosthetic limbs.  Glazer then cuts back to Höss, who has stopped retching and, after a pause, resumes his downstairs journey with renewed purpose.  That pause seems to suggest that he, too, has flashed forward across the decades; and the spring in his step that the vision appears to produce suddenly presents Höss as a different kind of villain, a buoyant sadist rather than a barbaric bureaucrat.  This may be intentional on Glazer’s part but it makes for a puzzling parting shot.

    Jonathan Romney’s S&S piece incorporates an interview with Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, who discussed with Romney ‘the challenges and discomfort faced by German actors in depicting such characters’.  Hüller also provides a fine insight into the challenge of playing someone whom she saw as ‘just boring and evil’.  This, she tells Romney:

    ‘… is something that goes against the natural impulse of an actor … we want to play interesting people and make ourselves more interesting through playing them.  It’s a very vain thing that we normally do, and it didn’t work here.  It would have been a fatal decision to put [sic] any sort of interesting character development that people usually look for.’

    Yet Sandra Hüller does a superb job, albeit she’ll be especially impressive to viewers who (like me) have very recently seen her in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall portraying a person neither boring or evil – we can thereby appreciate her versatility more keenly.  Hüller interprets Hedwig Höss with complete integrity:  she never reveals a trace of her personal antipathy to the woman she’s playing yet Hedwig’s blunt manner of speaking and inelegant walk serve as an unsettling clue to deeper gracelessness.  (She’s charmless and self-absorbed to the last.  You’d think Hedwig would be delighted that Rudolf is coming home from Berlin but, when he telephones her late at night to talk about it, she’s impatient to end the conversation, telling him she needs her sleep.)  I was less impressed by Christian Friedel (who made an auspicious cinema debut in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009):  I’ve not seen him since except on television in Babylon Berlin).  Friedel makes Rudolf Höss’s disengagement too comprehensive.  He doesn’t convince as a man well equipped to impress the Nazi high command.

    This is only the fourth feature that Jonathan Glazer has made in more than twenty years and the first in ten.  Like Under the Skin (2013), this new work is formidable and troubling – both, inevitably, on a larger scale than its sci-fi predecessor – because of Glazer’s directorial choices.  The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody is offensively wrong to dismiss The Zone of Interest as ‘Holokitsch’ and, as such, as ‘this year’s Jojo Rabbit‘ but Glazer does reiterate his central premise too often.  At the same time, his occasional departures from the prevailing style and tone of the film – a fade into a blood-red screen, the Alexandria-Joseph Wulf episode, Höss’s bizarrely invigorating closing vision of his terrible legacy – are consistently jarring.  Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest also have in common music by Mica Levi and an ingenious sound design by Johnnie Burn yet the combination of sonic elements epitomises what makes The Zone of Interest, as well as exceptionally compelling, disquieting in the wrong way.  The noise from the Auschwitz furnaces – a gross, stentorian belching – is hideously powerful.  The cries of terror and pain occasionally audible in the Höss family garden are distressing.  But the semi-musical sounds devised to suggest subterranean screams are aestheticised overkill – and yet another way of Jonathan Glazer saying the same thing.  The Zone of Interest, for all its skill, is a film with a one-track mind.

    7 February 2024

    [1] This is an odd evocation of the bad joke that even Hitler was nice to his dogs – although the bad joke is rooted in historical fact:  the Nazi regime was big on non-human animal welfare.

    [2] Playing for Time (a 1980 CBS television film) was a dramatisation by Arthur Miller of Fania Fénelon’s memoir The Musicians of Auschwitz (with Vanessa Redgrave as Fénelon).

  • The Long Hot Summer

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Martin Ritt (1958)

    This is an unusual piece of Southern Gothic: it ends with all the main characters, goodies and baddies, apparently set to live happily ever after and – more bizarrely – together, in the same large house.  Martin Ritt’s film is also a bit puzzling in relation to two other American pictures released in the same year:  Touch of Evil and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  The latter peculiarities centre on the imposing presence in The Long Hot Summer of Orson Welles.

    Welles plays Will Varner, who owns most of the businesses in the small town of Frenchman’s Bend, Mississippi, where the action is set, and is Mr Big in more ways than one.  Varner is meant to be sixty-one – a reminder that Welles’s overweight led to his playing men much older than he actually was:  he was still in his early forties when he made The Long Hot Summer. Once you see him in close-up here, it’s hard to take your eyes off his garish make-up.  Welles’s Varner isn’t just a redneck but a very red face; against this flesh tone, the dyed grey hair plastered across his forehead looks all the weirder.  Ritt’s film was released in March 1958, just a month before Welles’s Touch of Evil, in which the film’s director gave one of his finest performances, as the corrupt police chief Hank Quinlan.  Part of its success is Welles’s thoroughly and naturally convincing appearance as the grossly obese and seedy Quinlan.  Even allowing that The Long Hot Summer is in Technicolor and Touch of Evil black and white, you wonder who felt that Welles needed the excessive cosmetic aids that, in combination with his shallow acting, turn the tyrannical Will Varner into a cartoon villain.

    Although the opening titles describe the film as ‘William Faulkner’s The Long Hot Summer’, there’s no Faulkner book of that name as such.  The screenplay by the husband-and-wife team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr (the first of their eight scripts for Martin Ritt movies) actually derives from three Faulkner sources:  Spotted Horses (1931), a novella; Barn Burning (1939), a short story; and The Hamlet (1940), a novel – one part of which is called ‘The Long Summer’.  According to Wikipedia, the Ravetches were also ‘inspired by Tennessee Williams’ 1955 play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ in shaping some of their characters.  Again, you wonder why – when Richard Brooks’s screen version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was already in the works and would open in cinemas only five months after The Long Hot Summer.  Although Paul Newman stars in both films, the most salient similarities – physical and psychological – are between Welles’s Will Varner and Burl Ives’s Big Daddy Pollitt.  At the start of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Big Daddy has just returned home after clinical tests; at the start of The Long Hot Summer, Varner is – crucially for the plot – absent from home, receiving hospital treatment.  Big Daddy is terminally ill; although he doesn’t yet know it, he already fears it.  Varner isn’t on the way out but is very anxious to secure a kind of immortality through the grandchildren he doesn’t have.  His ineffectual son Jody (Anthony Franciosa) is married to the town flirt Eula (Lee Remick) but still childless.  His daughter Clara (Joanne Woodward), a schoolteacher with a mind of her own, shows no signs of getting her long-time beau, Alan Stewart (Richard Anderson), a Southern gentleman mother’s boy, to the altar.

    The Long Hot Summer has a striking prologue:  a barn bursts into flame; Ben Quick (Newman), the assumed culprit, is banished from the area by a local judge.  After a journey across water and along country roads, Ben hitches a lift with Clara and Eula into Frenchman’s Bend.  His reputation as an arsonist precedes him there but Jody Varner isn’t in the know.  With his father away, Jody lets Ben become a sharecropper on a vacant farm.  When Varner senior returns he’s furious with his son for hiring a barn burner but soon takes a liking to Ben’s shrewd opportunism and ambition – two qualities, among many, that are conspicuously lacking in Jody.  Will Varner’s first assignment for Ben is to sell a collection of unbreakable wild horses to local men.  Mission accomplished, his reward is a job alongside Jody in Varner’s general store.  Ben’s initiative soon sees him taking the lead there; his reward for that is an invitation from the old man to move from the nearby farm into the Varner residence.  Will Varner sees the well-named Quick as both his entrepreneurial heir and a prospective husband to Clara – and thereby puts both his children at daggers drawn with upstart Ben.

    Martin Ritt made some good films (Edge of the City (1957), Hud (1963), Sounder (1972), Norma Rae (1979)).  The Long Hot Summer isn’t one of them, despite its Faulkner bases and all the other talent involved – in front of the camera and behind.  Ritt’s task wasn’t helped by persistent tensions during production involving Orson Welles, whose eventual performance is as defective as it’s impossible to ignore.  You can tell from his line readings and facial expressions that Welles understands how the part should be played yet there’s a disconnect between that understanding and what comes across.  Despite his histrionic bombast, Welles’s portrait of Will Varner conveys a kind of contempt for what he’s being asked to do.  (He’s on record as saying, years later, that ‘I hated making Long Hot Summer.  I’ve seldom been as unhappy in a picture’.)  But Welles isn’t the only problem.  Although Ritt shot on location (in Louisiana), the film often has a studio-bound feel and not only when the actors are seen moving against what’s evidently a static background:  the interiors of the general store and the Varner house always look like sets.  As for Ritt’s extras … When another barn fire starts up in the climax to the story, the locals hurrying towards the plume of smoke are unmistakably a bunch of people obediently responding to ‘Action!’

    Two of the four Ritt films mentioned above (Hud and Norma Rae) were scripted by Harriet Frank and Irving Ravetch but The Long Hot Summer isn’t their finest hour either.  Despite the title, very little in the melodramatic storyline simmers – most of the plot twists are flambéd.  Ben tells Jody a cock-and-bull story about buried treasure from the Civil War; Jody digs up a bag of coins; his father promptly picks one up and informs his son it was minted in 1910; Jody is crushed.  When Clara refuses to wed Ben on her father’s say so, Will misunderstands her remarks about Alan Stewart; immediately drives to the Stewarts’ place and instructs Alan to get on with marrying Clara; discovers he’s got the wrong end of the stick; angrily smashes Mrs Stewart (Mabel Albertson)’s tea service; drives away even more quickly than he got there.   Humiliated, desperate Jody locks his father in a barn, sets the barn on fire but can’t go through with it.  The strength of ‘hate’ and ‘love’ that Jody shows in this episode instantly changes the father’s mind about his son – and, also at a stroke, appears to save Jody’s marriage.

    It’s as obvious as in the simplest romantic comedy that Ben and Clara, despite her sustained hostility to him, are made for each other yet the sinister, cruel elements of the material make it hard to enjoy their journey to eventual union as you would enjoy them in a romcom.  Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward nevertheless make The Long Hot Summer worth watching, even if their Methodical talents also expose more brutally Orson Welles’s style of acting.  Newman and Woodward’s near contemporaries with an Actors Studio background don’t fare so well, though – Anthony Franciosa because he’s in a thankless part, Lee Remick because she’s miscast.  Jody Varner can’t control his flighty young wife, let alone the men who hang around the Varner house of an evening, hollering and wolf whistling Eula, who’s tickled pink.  Lee Remick tries hard but she’s too fragrantly ladylike for the role.  Angela Lansbury, vividly eccentric as Will Varner’s long-standing, long-suffering mistress, delivers the most likeable turn among the supporting cast.

    The ghastly old patriarch is a widower:  when he eventually insists to Clara how much he adored her late mother, his daughter is improbably persuaded that he’s a nice person after all.  It’s very different when Ben melts Clara’s resistance by telling her he’s never set fire to property in his life – that his rascally father was the barn-burner in the Quick family and the source of Ben’s reputation.  Paul Newman had a genius for playing men whose easy charm masked emotional brittleness.  It comes through here whenever Ben bristles at a reproof from Clara – and especially powerfully when he reveals his unhappy family history.  When Varner’s barn starts to burn, local men assume that Ben’s responsible and form themselves into a lynch mob.  In the nick of time, Clara arrives in the convertible that gave Ben his first ride into Frenchman’s Bend and tells him to get into the car.  I couldn’t understand why they didn’t drive straight out of town (albeit suddenly good ol’ Will pacifies the mob, telling them he accidentally started the fire by dropping his lighted cigar in the hay).  But at least Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, once they’d departed the shoot, got married in real life, and stayed that way for the next fifty years.

    27 January 2024

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