Holocaust

If something cannot be highlighted in the filmography of British director Jonathan Glazer, born in London almost 59 years ago, it is his prolific qualities. At least not in the field of feature films: just four films in five decades of career. The case is different in the areas of advertising and video clips, the latter space where he knew how to put his craft at the service of bands such as Portishead, Blur, Jamiroquai, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Massive Attack, visually distinctive works made in an era –the 90s and early 2000s– in which the format shined with its own light before fading almost completely. His films also tend to stand out for aspects linked to formality, work with image and sound. After the debut The wild beast (2000), a modern gangster tale with Ben Kingsley on the brink of a sociopathy attack, was followed by the idiosyncratic and disturbing Reincarnation (2004), a portrait of trauma and loneliness with sharp fantastical edges starring Nicole Kidman, and Under the Skin (2013), a story with sci-fi hints about a peculiar black widow (Scarlett Johansson) embarking on a raid to consume as many men as possible. A decade after that film, Glazer premiered the tuxedo at the Cannes Film Festival with a film very far removed from his previous thematic interests: an adaptation of the novel The area of ​​interestby the English writer Martin Amis, whose protagonists are the officer in charge of commanding a concentration camp during Nazism and his family, inhabitants of a house literally adjacent to the horror of the genocide.

A co-production between the United Kingdom, Poland and the United States, the film was shot in German with the participation of Christian Friedel in the cast as Commander Rudolf Hoss, head of the daily operations at Auschwitz, and the great Sandra Hüller, the protagonist of the still on poster Anatomy of a fall, like his wife Hedwig. Thesis film with more than one experimental component, created from millimeter framing work and subjected to a rigorous sound coating that metaphorizes the unnameable, Area of ​​interestthe euphemism used by the Nazis to refer to the vicinity of the extermination camps, arrives in theaters this Thursday the 15th, weeks after having received five Oscar nominations: the double for Best Film and Best International Film, Best Direction, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound.

“The flash of lightning was not strange to me; Lightning was no stranger to me. With an enviable experience in both things, the downpour was no stranger to me; the downpour and then the sun and the rainbow. She was returning from the Old City with her two daughters, and they were already deep inside the Zone of Interest. (…) Tall, broad and full, and yet light-footed, in a white striped dress that reached to her ankles and a cream-colored straw hat with a black band, and a swaying straw handbag (the girls, also in white, also wore straw hats and bags), entered and exited stretches of tawny, yellowish, diffuse warmth. She was laughing with her head thrown back, her throat tight. I kept pace with her, in parallel, with my tailored tweed jacket and twill pants, with my peg board and my fountain pen. (…) And they entered the Kat Zet; on the Kat Zet I. Something happened at first glance. “A lightning bolt, a thunderclap, a downpour, the sun, the rainbow…, meteorology at first glance.” The first lines of the book by Martin Amis, who died on the same day as the world premiere of Glazer’s film in Cannes, offer a glimpse of the descriptive, impressionistic style of the text, which generated some controversy at the time of its publication but, at At the same time, it was received by critics with open arms. The words also anticipate some of the emotions of the protagonist, a young officer, towards the wife of the commander of the Kat Zet, short for concentration camp, concentration camp. None of that happens in the transfer to the screen: Glazer’s adaptation is free, taking elements from the novel and leaving others completely aside. In that sense, it is a film that converses with the original text, choosing the construction of a climate rather than the conservation of anecdotes and subplots. The thesis of Area of ​​interest (the film lost the article in the local translation) is simple and clear: horror, the unspeakable, the Holocaust, coexist peacefully with trivial activities. The banality of evil is an everyday occurrence.

Evil as a banal act

The warped chords of Mica Levi, a British composer who also goes by the name Micachu, sound from the speakers while the screen remains in total darkness. This will be the case during the first minutes of the projection, although the unmistakable singing of birds will be added to the electronic melody of the soundtrack. The first image is bucolic: a group of men, women and children rest on the grass, in front of a river and under the afternoon sun. It could be a hyperrealistic version of a painting by Monet or Renoir. At dusk, Rudolf Hoss, his wife Hedwig, his sons and daughters, and the maid walk toward the cars parked on the side of the dirt road. The return home includes the typical rituals: bath, dinner, daily conversation, good night, in addition to the conscientious turning off of all the lights in the house, which Rudolf carries out with a precise and calculated rhythm, undoubtedly identical that of the previous night and that of the following night, also similar to that of work objectives and obligations.

It’s morning and Glazer imposes the visual impact of everything to come: the well-kept garden, which includes all kinds of plants and flowers; the greenhouse located at the bottom of the lot; the small pool with slide; the little table and chairs to rest in the afternoons. Everything is located a few meters from one of the walls of the concentration camp, crowned by barbed wire. Higher up, the smoke from the chimneys signals the continuous factory movement in the factory of death. Some privileged prisoners manage to get out of there to momentarily help the Hosses with gardening tasks or general repairs; Others bring Hedwig a bag full of women’s underwear and a fur coat, gifts that are only possible thanks to the work of her father. Later, while the family and some guests celebrate the commander’s birthday, the screams of some prisoners, the barking of dogs, and the gunshots that finally appease the desperate screams are heard. With the exception of some documentary shots at the end that start from the past to enter fully into the present, Area of ​​interest It will never cross the limits of those gray walls, leaving the activities that day after day, night after night, occur inside there in an absolute off-screen.

“I had a very strange relationship with the project, from the beginning,” declared Jonathan Glazer in a recent interview with The Guardian newspaper. “It was the path I was on and I couldn’t help but follow it, but at the same time I was ready to abandon it at any moment. Sometimes I wanted to punch a brick wall, turn around and say, ‘You know what? I tried and I can’t do it.’ He was willing to make that happen.” The film was shot in Polish locations near the extermination camp; The technical team built the sets of the exterior and interior of the family home using real period photographs, in particular of the house of Nazi leader Rudolf Hoss, sentenced to death during the Nuremberg trials and executed in 1947 near the Auschwitz I crematorium. Regarding the complexities of writing a script focused exclusively on the perpetrators and not the victims, the director stated that “recognizing that couple as human beings was an important part of the creative process inherent to the film, but I always thought that , if we could do so, perhaps it would be possible to see ourselves in them. For me, Area of ​​interest It is not a film about the past. Try to talk about the present, about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims. It is necessary to reach a point of understanding the ideology to be able to write, but I was interested in making a film that went beyond that, to the core. I think there is something in us that drives everything, the capacity for violence that we have. For that reason it was important to build a story that the viewer completes, getting involved, asking questions.”

The nausea

The visit of Hedwig’s mother brings a new point of view, that of a foreigner who comes to visit the family home for the first time. The careful ornamentation of the garden receives praise, although the woman mistakenly imagines that the girls who help around the house are country Jews. Anti-Semitism is rampant, but it is so imbued in each of the characters that it would be abnormal for them to have any kind of human consideration. Despite this, something pushes the visitor to leave early: the reflection of the fire in the fireplaces at night, the smell of ashes or perhaps something more elusive but definitely horrifying. When thinking about the character of Hedwig, who largely directs the narrative from her point of view as a housewife, wife and mother, Glazer points out in the aforementioned interview that “there is this feeling that nothing and no one should stop.” . Everyone must be busy with some activity all the time, because if you stop, you think. And if you think, you reflect. With Hedwig there is no reflection, no consideration for anything or anyone except herself. “She is constantly, relentlessly busy so she doesn’t have to think.”

At various times, Area of ​​interest It is crossed by sequences with inverted colors, like an old photographic negative in motion. They could be dreams or nightmares (one night the father reads the girls the original, unsoftened version of Hansel and Gretel), but they could also be a very real inversion of the surrounding horror: a young girl hides apples and other fruits in the ground to that, the next day, they are collected by those lucky ones who manage to leave the field for a while to carry out tasks in the neighboring field. Later, in Berlin, Rudolph Hoss will attend a party of military and civil high society, and the vomiting – perhaps caused by excessive alcohol consumption – is confused in the viewer’s mind with a more essential emesis. Controversial, dividing waters, Glazer’s film has received enormous praise but also criticism for its surgical, dry, distant nature. It is difficult to imagine another way of portraying the coexistence of the normal – tucking the children in before going to sleep, an outdoor party in the garden, a horse ride between a father and his son – with the industrial destruction of bodies, of being. human. The director’s bet is extreme and without ornament: the normalization of extermination and horror is much more common and current than one could imagine and the present time, this 21st century that has barely begun, has so far only demonstrated it. with profit.