By Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 12/21/23 – The newly re-opened Vista Theater in East Hollywood hosted a special screening of Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” (UK, 2023, in German) last Thursday evening. This highly unsettling film is adapted from the 2014 Martin Amis novel of the same name.
The title refers to what the Nazi SS called the 40 square kilometer area immediately surrounding the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. It is here that Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), commandant of the camp, and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, who also starred in the French film “Anatomy of a Fall”) make a home for their family.
It’s a beautiful home surrounded by a lovely and abundant garden full of life. Their children run free there, as does their unruly dog, a stark contrast to the people just over the shared garden wall who have had their freedom and belongings stripped from them, imprisoned in the most atrocious place, and murdered en mass by the Nazi SS.
The film imagines the pure bucolic bliss experienced by Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss who with his family lives in a handsomely appointed family home with servants just outside the barbed-wire-topped wall. His wife, Hedwig is thrilled with the Edenic “paradise garden” she has been allowed to supervise at the rear, complete with greenhouse: she revels smugly in her unofficial title “Queen of Auschwitz.”
Referring to the 40-kilometer swath of Poland in which Nazi rule intended to execute what they would one day call Hitler’s “final solution,” the film’s title is a crafty nod to its central theme, the normalization of atrocity motivated by personal gain.
The Hösses love to go fishing and bathing in the beautiful lakes and streams of the Polish countryside thereabouts, although at one stage Höss discovers what appears to be bone fragments and dark particulate matter in the river that has washed downstream from the camp and curtly orders his children out of the water and back to their lovely home for a wash.
But really, they live in complete denial in an enclosed world. Family life continues in all its unimaginable dysfunction, scene follows scene in unbearable affectless detachment, with the children being attended to, the servants instructed, the Nazi wives gossiped with (they chat about a nice dress salvaged from some “little Jewess”) Hedwig’s mother is
welcomed into the house, and all the time screams, shouts and gunshots are continuously audible from over the wall. They are used to it. Meanwhile, the SS officers discuss the most technically efficient means of mass extermination; we never enter the camp itself, though Höss indulges himself with a female prisoner in his office.
Hedwig Höss, played with a chilling stoicism by Hüller, views Auschwitz as a fertile ground for her personal procurement. Obtaining furs, silk blouses and jewelry that her husband brings home “from work” Hedwig becomes accustomed to a lavish lifestyle, one that she refuses to relinquish. Using words like “sacrifice” and “birthright” with no hint of self-condemnation, is enough to enrage viewers of the film.
Behind the dark and emotionless shark’s eyes of Rudolf Höss is German actor Friedel, a soul tortured by his decision to accept the role of a man who governs his murder factory with a banker’s eye. Efficiency, effectiveness, and a data driven approach are what elevate Rudolf Höss to commandant of Auschwitz.
Capturing the essence of his evil yet only witnessing his deeds on the home front, proves a delicately layered dynamic within Friedel’s memorable performance. In 1943 Hitler’s “final solution” would eventually name Höss as tip of the Nazi spear and through orders from Reichsfürer Heinrich Himmler to enact “Operation Höss” the extermination of 430,000 Hungarian Jews by way of the gas chamber.
The most stunning shot created by Glazer and his cinematographer Łukasz Żal is the pin-sharp, deep focus view from the Hösses’ charming front garden down the path to the camp wall, behind which the chimney is visible against a vivid, hallucinatory blue sky: Höss likes to tour the horrendous compound on horseback.
But the horror of what is happening begins to surface in aberrant behavior: The Höss’ daughter sleepwalks, and Hedwig’s mother is more disturbed by this menage than she will admit; troubled by the memory of once having worked for a Jewish woman that Hedwig briskly agrees may indeed be in the camp a few hundred meters from where they are talking in the beautiful garden.
While the protagonist in Martin Amis’ novel is named Paul Doll, Glazer chose to name Friedel’s character Rudolf Höss. This immediately points to Glazer’s interest in bringing in the weight of a well-recorded historical character living in a specific place and time: the Höss household next to Auschwitz I in Oświęcim (Auschwitz) from 1943 to 1944.
Much of the film follows the routine goings-on in and around the home, such as Rudolf enjoying the rowboat that his family gifted him for his birthday; his subordinates toasting their beloved boss; businessmen and engineers taking meetings in the living room; and Rudolf transmitting and receiving messages via telegraph.
Rather than put gruesome imagery of death and cruelty front and center on screen, Glazer uses the film’s grueling sound design to represent the unfathomable scope of Nazi Germany’s crimes. It’s an aural hell punctuated by rhythmic interludes, courtesy of frequent collaborator Mica Levi, that suggests a dance party in Dante’s Inferno.
There are no visual details conveyed as to the atrocities taking place next door in the internment camp of Auschwitz. Unlike Stephen Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993), “The Zone of Interest” needs no shock or awe. Glazer clearly made the artistic decision to omit many of the excruciating realities of Auschwitz, in favor of allowing pointed allusion and prior audience knowledge to fill the gaps.
Glazer ends the film after the second act and immediately after comes a sequence that’s sure to provoke endless debate as we suddenly find ourselves in the current buildings of the Auschwitz, watching Polish women today cleaning up the crematorium and window displays of confiscated shoes and suitcases of Jews put to death there.
Construction of Auschwitz II began in 1942 and from 1942 until late 1944 freight trains delivered Jews from all over German-occupied Europe to its gas chambers. Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million were murdered. The number of victims included 960,000 Jews (865,000 of whom were gassed on arrival), 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 others.
Those not gassed were murdered via starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, or beatings. Others were killed during medical experiments by the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele.
The Zone of Interest is currently screening at the Vista Theatre in East Hollywood and the AMC Theatre in Santa Monica. It is a likely Oscar contender and definitely worth seeing – despite its troubling depiction of Nazi indifference about the fate of Jews for whom Auschwitz is a giant graveyard.
