A classic family birthday scene; in the distance, in the same shot, a watchtower. Colorful flowers along a grayish perimeter wall, and a man in a bathing suit on the shore of a lake, whom a cutter has dressed in an SS uniform the next day. The rare images ofAuschwitz are part of our collective memory, assimilated at school by viewing Resnais' Nuit et Brouillard. But is it really possible to imagine life around death?
In The Zone of Interest, his fourth feature film in Official Competition at Cannes 2023, Jonathan Glazer reveals the invisible in the heart of an area little documented by history. Horror was also brewing on the other side of the barracks and barbed wire, in the home of Rudolf Höss, commandant ofAuschwitz-Birkenau, and his family, who lived peacefully outside the camp.
The power and prowess of The Zone of Interest lies in its ability to represent the unspeakable without being seen, through vividly colored shots - red, green - that fill the screen and illustrate, through their emptiness, the sound of bullets, cries of terror and groans of pain. Not once is there a glimpse of the other side of the concentration camp's perimeter wall, filmed in long tracking shots. And yet, throughout the film, it's impossible not to think about what's happening off-screen, like a brain divided in two, one part watching the images, the other feeling the omnipresent death.
The Höss family goes about their business, their days punctuated by obscene rituals. With a cup of coffee in hand, Madame giggles with her friends at the mention of the diamond found hidden by a Jewish woman in a tube of toothpaste; before going upstairs to try on a fur salvaged from the mass of condemned women who had arrived in the convoy that very morning and had probably already been gassed. An indecent economic system that allows for opulence, barbecues in the open air and children splashing around in the pool. Monsieur, in his office, consults the plans for a new crematorium as if he were choosing a new kitchen. The brutality of the discrepancy provokes a shock, like the line ('c'est paradisiaque') uttered when visiting the family's Edenic garden.
In the face of horror, Jonathan Glazer opts for radicalism, with a mise-en-scène that, under the guise of minimalism, expresses a great deal - to the point of nausea. The formal framing is very wide, making it impossible to distinguish the facial features of the executioners, the shots are fixed - sometimes three - to accompany a one-second exchange in a doorway, the colors in the house are desaturated, and the wordless shots stretch on and on. But the filmmaker knows how to break away from his narrative, with dreamy, hallucinatory scenes in negative, with a texture akin to that of a video game; and with the use of piano notes as words - deeply moving.
Like the pairs of shoes, the mountains of suitcases, the children's clothes that will never be worn again, relegated to being displayed behind a glass case in the Auschwitz museum, the end credits signed by Mica Levi, Jonathan Glazer's composer since Under The Skin, resonate like the voices of the millions of souls that are no more. A Grand Prix that Martin Amis, the author of the adapted book, will unfortunately not be able to share. The British author passed away the day after the presentation of The Zone of Interest at Cannes.
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