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Life is good, on a fine day, by a glittering lake. A family picnic on the grass, a merry swim, and the comforting of a crying baby. Such is the opening scene of “The Zone of Interest,” a new film from Jonathan Glazer. The family is that of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five children. Later, as darkness gathers, they drive back home to their orderly house, beside the walls of Auschwitz.
Höss is not a fictional invention. He was the commandant at Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943, and returned there in May, 1944, on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, specifically to oversee the extermination of Hungarian Jews. Their arrival in unprecedented numbers—up to twelve thousand a day—was a logistical challenge to which S.S. Obersturmbannführer Höss was trusted to rise. Train lines were extended so that they ran right up to two of the crematoriums. The entire operation even bore his name: Aktion Höss. A rare honor.
Of the killings that were meted out under the aegis of Höss, “The Zone of Interest” shows none. Much of the story is set in the house where he and his loved ones dwell, with its pretty garden, rich in blooms. There are trips to the surrounding countryside, although, in one unfortunate incident, Höss is obliged to chivy his offspring out of a river, where they are paddling, because human remains have washed downstream. Another inconvenience: the daily routine of the Höss household is punctuated by yelps and cries, the chug of trains, the firing of weapons, and a low but discernible roar, as if some beast—a fire-breathing dragon—had its lair beyond the garden wall. What lies out of sight need not be out of earshot. Either way, you might think, it cannot be out of mind.
Think again. “Man is a creature who can get used to anything, and I believe that is the very best way of defining him.” The words are Dostoyevsky’s, in “Memoirs from the House of the Dead,” and he is writing of prisoners in Siberia. The definition applies, however, not just to the victims of cruelty but also to its perpetrators. What is demonstrated by “The Zone of Interest”—which Glazer adapted, very obliquely, from a novel by the late Martin Amis—is that, given the right conditions, people can discover in themselves a pathological talent for ignoring the torments of others. Look at Frau Höss, sorting through clothing that has been stripped from those who are due to be gassed (the implication is clear, though never spelled out) and seeing what takes her fancy. Finding a fur coat, she models it in front of a mirror, turning from side to side to catch her best angle. This is, I would say, the most repellent image in the movie, enshrining all that is pitiless in Hüller’s terrifying performance. Who will merit the lower circle of Hell: Höss, discussing the most efficient method for meeting his murderous quota, or Hedwig, serving coffee to friends?
It’s no surprise that, when Höss is posted to another job, Hedwig is aghast. She wants to stay at Auschwitz, tending her flowers, rather than uproot the children and move on. Such is the plain shape of the plot. In a sense, “The Zone of Interest” is a simple work: calmly composed, fiercely controlled, and dedicated to the proof of one central irony—the nearness of ordinary lives to a tumult of death. Glazer achieves what he sets out to do, and you have to admire his tenacity, his technical skill, and his tact. Too many dramatizations of the Holocaust have left us flinching and queasy, whereas Glazer, in choosing so precisely what to show and what not to show, gives us no chance (and no excuse) to look away.
Yet one has to ask: Is this movie couched in its most effective form? In making the same point, however morally urgent, over and over again, does the film fortify or weaken its case? Go back to “Night and Fog,” Alain Resnais’s Holocaust documentary, from 1956—filmed partly in Auschwitz and Majdanek, another site of organized slaughter in Poland—and you will find the same argument put forward with greater economy. We see archival photographs of a commandant’s residence (where, a narrator tells us, “his wife keeps house and entertains”) and of guests playing chess and enjoying drinks. The sequence lasts roughly fifteen seconds; the whole movie is over in half an hour. If “The Zone of Interest” were that long it would attract fewer viewers, but I wonder if such brevity might not heighten its power to stupefy an audience, as “Night and Fog” does, and to reduce us to silence.
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