It was among the surprises that came with the Cannes Film Festival. Although Anatomy of a Fall won the Palme d’Or over Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest, this strong work which was awarded the Grand Prize by the jury presided over by Ruben Östlund did not lose out.
Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller
By revealing the nearly routine everyday life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his ideal little family, the director of Under The Skin immerses the audience in the core of evil. The director says, “I wanted to capture the contrast between someone being murdered on one side of the wall and someone pouring coffee in their kitchen, the coexistence of these two extremes.”
The only thing between the camp from their lovely suburban home is a shared wall in the garden. In their mediocrity, Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller (this is unquestionably the year after Anatomy of a Fall) perfectly capture this awful marriage.
Jonathan Glazer took a risk while adapting Martin Amis’s book: instead of showing what transpires in the concentration camp, he allows the audience to envision it through outstanding music work that subtly creates a terrifying mood. acceptable. Mica Levi composed an amazing soundtrack for the movie.
Nothing will ever compare to the unimaginably powerful visuals presented in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, which is presently being rerun on France 2, or Alain Resnais’s Nuit et Brouillard, which force the viewer to face reality head-on.
Ultimate Solution
Thanks to Jonathan Glazer’s method, we can envision what goes on in a little, civilized society when it is not on camera. The lives of the characters are punctuated by gunshots, flying ash, screaming, passing trains, and other horrors that leave the blood running cold.
A fervent supporter of the “ultimate solution,” the father is loving with his family and exhibits greater enthusiasm for his garden than for the people he kills to be as “efficient” as possible. His wife is more concerned with maintaining his bourgeois comfort than she is with potential developments beyond the wall.
If it means moving her husband to a different camp, she will never, ever want to leave what she views as a lovely paradise. And what about the division of the deportees’ belongings among the many executioners in the community? The contrast between their comfortable life and the terrifying nearby area is so stark that it manages to be both visually modest and as repulsive as a direct representation.
A Responsibility to Avoid and Remember
Jonathan Glazer suffocates the audience member he asks to consider the idea of inhumanity. La Zone d’interest is unquestionably a significant movie, even though the message is occasionally emphasized (particularly at the end of the movie) and the entire thing seems a little poseur with a device that would be more at home in a modern art museum.
It can assist us in finding the filthy beast, which is frequently enticed to rear its ugly head again, and it brings to mind the unimaginable.
