What is The Zone of Interest worth, the 2023 Cannes Grand Prix (review)
Glazer completes the transformation of the “Holocaust film” into a field of theoretical exercise and formal experimentation, without avoiding any of the usual pitfalls of what must now be called a genre.
To show, not to show, to tell or not to tell, to film or not to film. Turning his camera seven times in his noggin before saying “action!” », Jonathan Glazer knew all the pitfalls and he is not a filmmaker who jumps into it without thinking. Four feature films in twenty-three years, three over the last twenty years, one per decade (Birth in 2004, Under the Skin in 2013, The Area of Interest in 2023/24), these long absences each time weigh on the level of expectations and the height of his reputation, which rise in an almost unreasonable manner pushing him to return each time with a radical, impossible, almost crazy proposal. A child who calls himself the reincarnation of a man and demands his rightful place in his wife’s bed (Birth). A female predatory ET under the skin of Scarlett Johannson, transformed in turn by her gender into a victim of sexual assault (Under the Skin). The bucolic life of the family of Rudolph Höss, commander and director of operations at Auschwitz (The Area of Interest). Besides the fact that we are already curious to know what aesthetic-provocative angel’s leap the British director will propose in 2033, we must note the experimental nature of his work. After the supernaturalist visions of Under the Skinhere is the device The Area of Interest: the Nazi house full of high-def cameras which allow a small theater of (in principle) unspoken horror, the moral atrocity passing smoothly from the courtyard to the living room, from the ground floor to the upper floor , from the kitchen to the garden, from the vestibule to the cellar, each vacant in their domestic occupations while the death factory runs smoothly a few dozen meters away.
The theorem of the film is the perpetual, obsessive presence of the genocidal machine, at the most intimate, tender and (apparently) innocuous moments, when stories are told to children before going to sleep (Hansel and Gretel and the Witch in the oven), when we have tea with friends (“ oh how pretty your placemats are “), when we sit down at the table for dinner (” close the window, my darling, it’s chilly tonight “, while atrocious screams are heard), when the children play knucklebones (teeth taken from corpses) or go for a picnic near the river (no spoiler here). The reconstitution effort is manic (filming location, decorative objects, everyday utensils), the technical precision (frame, continuity of sequences despite cuts, thanks to the system of simultaneous cameras, some hidden) absolute. However, Glazer is tripping over his pretty stair carpets. The challenge was to be part of the history of the (non) representation of the death camps, to say that in terms of the Shoah, off-camera is also unbearable and even, as far as the protagonists themselves are concerned , even more odious, those who act as if the horror was not right there, within reach of noise, smell and awareness. Except that the filmmaker leaves nothing off-screen, precisely. Neither the blood (to be cleaned from the Nazi’s boots), nor the human remains (half a dozen sequences), nor the furs to steal, nor the girls to rape, nor the glowing smoke from the crematorium, nor the postures of Cinema SS, played like a basic Naziploitation (shoulder straps down, belly forward, chin high, supervillain grin). The film burdens itself with a double punishment: both academic (the manuals of off-camera, of the unfilmable and of the banality of evil recited by heart) but clumsily contradicting its own theoretical doxa by aligning the effects meaning, rhyme and shock, like checking a shopping list at the supermarket.
Of Jonathan Glazer. With Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Johann Karthaus… Duration 1h46. Released January 31
