The year is 1943. The place is Auschwitz, Poland. German SS officer Rudolph Hoss (Christian Friedel – “Babylon Berlin”) has been commandant of the concentration death camp since its creation in 1940, and has made extensive expansion and improvement in efficiency over the years. He, his wife, and their five children live in a comfortable villa that abuts the walls of the death camp. Every day, trains bring Jews and other prisoners to the camp for execution. The crematories run day and night, casting an orange pall over everything during the hours of darkness.
Horrible as that is, the film concentrates on something else – the ordinary life of the Hoss family. Hedwig (Sandra Huller – “Anatomy of a Fall”), Rudolph wife, has the same pride of home, her husband’s success, of her children and her place in society, as any other wife in any other society might have. The children are like middle class children anywhere. They enjoy their relatively pampered lives, bicker with one another, and play tricks. All the while, in the background, we hear the trains arriving, the screams of men, women and children, and occasional gunfire. Oh, and the never ending smoke and fire from the crematorium. However, scenes withing the camp are never shown.
A particularly telling vignette is when the family is enjoying a day at the river. The children are excitedly riding in a new boat, and Rudolph is fishing in the water. Suddenly he feels something and reaches down, pulling up what looks like a human jawbone. At the same moment we see the water turning milky: they are dumping the ashes from the crematorium into the river. Rudolph rushes to the boat and pulls the children and Hedwig to the shore. Back home they frantically wash themselves clean of the contamination. Later, one of the women from the camp who works as a servant in the Hoss home must wash the remnants of human ash from the tub. Those could have been her ashes.
Director Johnathan Glazer (“Under the Skin”) and novelist Martin Amis (“London Fields”) have created a chilling account of people from ordinary backgrounds who, once caught up in the horrific mythology of Nazi philosophy, become capable of living out pleasant lives while not just tolerating but actively participating in the torment and destruction of other human beings.
At one time, it was thought that there must be something horribly wrong with the German psyche for people like the Hosses to do what they did. But history and social science has shown us that any group of people anywhere is equally capable of such inhuman behavior, and we see it alive in our 21st century world almost every day.
“The Zone of Interest also features extraordinary cinematography by Lucasz Zal, an original musical score by Mica Levi, and compellingly photographed inverse black and white sequences illustrating the concurrent efforts of a young Polish girl to bring apples to the doomed prisoners. This serves as a counterpoint to the well-lit, colorful sequences of everyday man-made hell.
This is a highly recommended film, nominated for numerous awards, that every person wondering about what makes us human –- and inhuman — should see.
Notes:
• Martin Amis died on the very day this film was presented at the Cannes International Film Festival.
• Rudolph Hoss escaped capture and hid in Germany for a year. He was betrayed by his wife and arrested. Eventually he was tried, convicted and executed in 1947 by the Polish Supreme National Tribunal. His executed was by hanging next to the Auschwitz camp crematorium.
. . .
Join us on Facebook at
http://www.facebook.com/itsjustmovies!