The British director is provocative. He shows the world of the concentration camp and its surroundings as the eponymous business zone, where normal life goes on, people make money, profit and build their own world. Here, Glazer talks about the commercialis ation of war and the human egoism that makes it possible to tame the worst evils. Loosely inspired by Martin Amis’s 2015 novel (about an affair between an SS man and the wife of a camp commandant), The Zone of Interest is a story about the banality of evil and its taming. About the force of habit that allows one not to see.
By telling the story of people who build their private paradise in the shadow of Auschwitz, Glazer demonstrates the power of cinema as an art of posing questions. There are not many words, and the dialogue is used for simple communication rather than to express great emotions or philosophical reflections. The most important thing is the image, Łukasz Żal’s sterile, cool cinematography giving the impression that, like an entomologist in a laboratory, we are observing strange insects on the screen. Then there is the sound, brilliantly used by Johnny Burn and Tarn Willers – terrifyingly precise, going beyond what is visible. For the idyllic images of a summer garden are juxtaposed with the sound of distant gunshots, the muffled barking of dogs, the roar of a camp oven – sounds that try to break through to the consciousness of the characters and the audience.
At a time when bookshop shelves are overflowing with Holocaust kitsch and screens are being filled with adaptations of exploitative novels about tattooists, prostitutes and singers from Auschwitz, Glazer has created a cinematic masterpiece. Sterile, situated somewhere on the border of mannerism. A film that evokes great emotion, even though it does not itself operate with it.
One could accuse Glazer of cutting himself off from kitsch representations of the Holocaust in his studied, aesthetically precise vision, now aimed at academics, gallery-goers and prestigious festivals. That he pushes the boundaries by creating a fairytale horror film about Auschwitz. But the British director successfully counters this argument by making his film more than a showy postcard from the past.
Glazer rejects the two most obvious strategies for talking about the Holocaust. He does not take us – like Spielberg in Schindler’s List or Nemes in Son of Saul – on a journey in which we could identify with the victims and become, for a moment, accomplices in their tragedy. He also dispenses with clownish provocation on the scale of that in Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, Mihăileanu’s Train of Life or Waikiki’s recent Jojo Rabbit.
