Ten years after “Under The Skin”, Jonathan Glazer returns with “The Zone of Interest”, presented in competition at the 76th Cannes Film Festival. It follows the daily life of a family that lives on a wall of the Auschwitz camp. Major and remarkable film.
Between 1940 and 1945, nearly 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz, the largest concentration camp of World War II. But what was happening a few meters from the nameless? What does the reverse shot of barbarism look like? Briton Jonathan Glazer answers this question with the uppercut The Zone of Interest, presented in competition at the 76th Cannes Film Festival.
Adapted from the eponymous novel by Martin Amis – rejected by Gallimard -, the film follows the domestic life of the family of Commander Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), who responds to Hitler’s orders. Only a cement wall stands between the horror and their daily lives. The Hösses, especially the wife, Hedwig (chilling Sandra Hüller), spends her time perfecting the house and garden – which echoes that of Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle.
The servants – Jews employed by the family – are busy tending to this surreal setting. The wife welcomes her friends, her mother, tries on the clothes of the deportees, while the children play as if nothing had happened.
Necessarily provocative, this concept allows the director to explore the darkest face of human beings, deaf and blind in the face of atrocity. Can we really get used to cruelty and invite it into our daily lives? Between traditional and experimental cinema, The Zone of Interest particularly shocking because it shows nothing. Everything is off-screen.
The sound of screams and gunshots diffuse in the atmosphere, as for the smoke of the ovens, it never leaves the screen. It hovers over this family whose balance is threatened when the father is transferred to another perimeter.
Difficult to reveal more as The Zone of Interest is based on an immersive experience. Horror, omnipresent in the background, has shaken up the Croisette. After ten years of absence, Jonathan Glazer has already established himself as a favorite for the Palme d’Or.
“Well, Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is extraordinary. Relentlessly austere in the way it shows humans can normalize adjacent atrocities. The sound in particular is remarkable.”
The Zone of Interest, soon in theaters.