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).