Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig live peacefully and happily with their children in a dream house, surrounded by a garden and swimming pool, enjoying their pleasant baths in the river. The Höss would seem like the portrait of an idyllic family if it weren’t for the fact that the patriarch is the commandant at Auschwitz and their house is separated only by a fence from the devastating concentration and extermination camp for Jews. The daily routine of that Nazi couple is the focus of The Zone of Interest, a chilling film in which the British Jonathan Glazer observes the Holocaust from the point of view of the perpetrators in a free adaptation of the novel homonym written by Martin Amis in 2014.
If the text created discomfort for addressing the extermination in a satirical way by describing a story of love and jealousy between barbarian officials, the film stands as one of the most accurate and harsh films on the subject. And all this without showing the viewer a single scene of violence, in an absolute display of how to suggest through sound, music and off-field. “I never had the intention of recreating any atrocity visually. The idea was to talk to the viewer about the human capacity for violence, which we have as a species, and also about the familiarity of the perpetrators. It was about them seeing these people not as anomalies, but as their neighbors, normal people who ended up becoming mass murderers and were so dissociated from their crimes that they didn’t see them as such,” says Glazer in a wheel of press by video conference.
It had been ten years since the director had shot a feature film, since ’, a cult film in which Scarlett Johansson was a deadly alien. He had previously shot the more discreet Reencarnación and Sexy beast. With La zona de interés he takes a giant step in his short filmography in a film that arrives in Catalan theaters on Friday, aims for the Oscar for the United Kingdom and already dazzled in its premiere at the Cannes Festival, in which he won with the Grand Jury Prize. Precisely, the day after its official screening at the contest, it was announced that Amis had died at the age of 73 due to esophageal cancer. Born into a Jewish family, Glazer had been looking for a different way to approach the Holocaust for some time when he found Amis’s book. “I read it three or four times in nine years, it seemed like a brave attempt and in a way it helped me to know what I wanted to explain. I never intended to make an adaptation of it, it was more of a spark that led me to research the real character that inspired Amis his fictional commander. What he had written was clearly based on the real commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, so I began to read about the real person and, by extension, about his wife, his private world.”
With the aim of filming a story in the service of authenticity, the filmmaker relied on the Nazi’s home photographs to design the seven fifty meters from an Auschwitz extermination camp that he was afraid to visit, today turned in museum He hid several micro-cameras and filmed without the actors – magnificent Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel – knowing where the equipment was. “Without a doubt, there was a power and concentration that came with that proximity and I’m convinced that the atmosphere is in every pixel of the film,” he admits.
The Höss we see in the film reads stories to his children at night and behaves like an exemplary father, while a few meters away he is in command of the deadliest extermination camp of the Third Reich, with more than a million dead. After his arrest, he justified himself by arguing that he was following orders. A man with a wife even more ruthless than him. We see her walking around the garden with her baby, looking at the beautiful flowers. He proudly shows the house to his guests, a macabre dwelling from which his own mother flees without saying a word and where children play with the gold teeth of murdered Jews. Hedwig is so happy in that place that she begs her husband to stay there when he is offered a change of destination. They have built their home just a wall away from the horror, the gas chambers and a crematorium that spews ashes that end up in the river where the family bathes. Mundane scenes with which Glazer dissects that “banality of evil” coined by the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt to affirm that people capable of committing great atrocities can be perfectly normal people. The Höss have become accustomed to the sound of gunshots and screams that can be heard in the distance, the smoke coming from the crematorium and the stench of death.
In a world affected by several wars, Glazer reveals that the only point of making this film was that it had to do with the present day and provoke reflection on a violent way of acting that remains unchanged in the human being : “I think we have to evolve beyond our capacity for violence. I refuse to believe that we can’t get out of this, but it is absolutely necessary for each of us to face it. The film is about our capacity and the possibility that each of us is a perpetrator, about what we choose to love, who we choose to empathize with, and who we choose not to. It is a very complex set of circumstances. But I think it’s fundamentally an inner examination. The film tries to subconsciously connect with the viewer”.
That is why he made The area of ??interest for the public today, as a warning. “We tried to look at these people as if they were our neighbors. It is about our capacity for violence and complicity in violence. How we dissociate from the horrors of the world to protect our own state of mind, our safety, our luxury and our choices.” And he concludes: “It will get us nowhere if we continue to think of ourselves as victims and look at others as perpetrators.” The lessons of history are not always learned, evil still abounds in the imperfect 21st century.
