Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig Hoss (Sandra Huller) are a couple in their late thirties/early forties who live in a large, pleasant, house with their four kids. Their lives, for the most part, are unremarkable and upwardly mobile. They have a maid and a gardener. The kids play with toy soldiers and tin drums and in the large garden they grow potatoes, fennel, and kohlrabi.
Friends come round for tea, Hedwig's mother comes to stay, and sometimes Rudolf's work colleagues pop round and they talk shop. It would be all be quite mundane except for one thing. Rudolf Hoss is the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and execution camp and the wall of his garden backs on to the camp.
The Hoss family seem wholly inured to the atrocities that are happening the other side of the wall, the Jews having been successfully dehumanised by the Nazi regime, but we, of course, know different. We recognise the camp buildings and the observation tower and we know what the smoke belching from the camp's chimneys mean.
In Jonathan Glazer's The Zone Of Interest (based on a 2014 book by Martin Amis), we hear gunshots, screams, and other uncomfortable noises - even while we see nothing. At times it's hard to know if the noises are coming from the camp or are from Mica Levi's excellent score - or perhaps both. It should be remarkable - but of course it isn't - that at no point does Rudolf, Hedwig, or, in fact, anyone else express any doubt about the morality of what's happening. Instead, Rudolf frets about a potential move away to work at Orianenburg and Hedwig only gets upset when it is suggested they may have to leave what she considers to be the home, and life, they had always dreamed of.
Hedwig tries on fur coats belonging to Jews who have been interred, and likely killed, in the camp while her mother, Linna (Imogen Koppe), wonders if "Esther Silberman is over there - the one I used to clean for". Though not, it seems, out of compassion for Esther. She doesn't wonder for long. The conversation soon turns to the Hosses swimming pool. It's even got a slide. The kids love it.
They also love dressing up in Nazi uniforms and every formal conversation ends with an earnest "Heil Hitler". I couldn't help thinking of the That Mitchell And Webb Look sketch when one of the Nazis has a moment of self-awareness and asks his colleague "are we the bad guys?".
There is, however, no moment of self-awareness for Rudolf or Hedwig Hoss - although for Rudolf it may have come when he was executed, in Auschwitz appropriately enough, in April 1947. But the film doesn't show that. The film is just a small window opened so that we can see how the banality of evil (the phrase memorably coined by Hannah Arendt) worked so efficiently.
Hoss isn't a monster, he doesn't appear as evil incarnate, he's just a guy doing his job to the best of his ability and trying to make a nice life for his family. The fact that that job involved overseeing the forced execution of over one million people doesn't seem to bother him one iota. There's no narrative arc, as such, in this film. Just footage of the Hosses eating meals, being rude to their staff, playing in the river (the same river some of the camp detainees are drowned in), and wandering around their big house.
Which makes The Zone Of Interest all the more chilling. Watching this film fifteen or twenty years ago I would have taken it as a historical document about the most horrific events of the twentieth century and been thankful I never had to live through them. Watching it in 2024, sadly, I didn't feel the same. In the last couple of weeks alone Vladimir Putin has threatened to drop a nuclear bomb on France, the Pope has suggested Ukraine surrender to Putin, Donald Trump (whom both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have been campaigning on behalf of) has claimed if he becomes President again (which seems increasingly likely) he will not only give Putin a free hand to do as he wishes but actively encourage him to invade further countries (while saying if he loses the election there will be a 'bloodbath'). I used to think the events that make up the background of this film could never ever happen again. Now I'm not so sure.
No comments:
Post a Comment