Have you made it your goal to watch all of the Best Picture nominees before the Golden Globes on Sunday night?
I’ve seen them all and the one that’s the hardest to watch — and hardest to forget — is Jonathan Glazer’s inverted Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest,” which won the Grand Prix and FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival before its Globe nominations for Best Picture: Drama, Best Non-English Language Film and Best Original Score.
Loosely based on the 2014 novel of the same name by British author Martin Amis, the harrowing film is set in 1943 in German-occupied Poland where Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss and his housewife Hedwig raise their five Aryan children in a lavish home directly on the other side of the walls of the concentration camp.
In many ways, the film is the opposite of Steven Spielberg’s emotional “Schindler’s List” (1993), which brilliantly immersed us in pathos. It also differs from the dreamlike playfulness of Roberto Benigni’s “Life is Beautiful” (1997) and satirical comedy of Taika Waititi’s “JoJo Rabbit” (2019). It’s closer to László Nemes’ “Son of Saul” (2015), which left the atrocities lurking just outside the frame, but even that was still set inside the concentration camp.
Intentionally, “The Zone of Interest” never once enters the camps during the actual Holocaust. Instead, we patiently watch Commandant Höss (Christian Friedel, “13 Minutes”) host various Nazi meetings to matter-of-factly discuss the “final solution” of gassing millions of Jewish people. We also watch his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, who also stars in the Globe nominee “Anatomy of a Fall”) cook meals, hang laundry and tend her garden.
At times, the pacing of these mundane tasks rivals Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman” (1975) in challenging our attention spans to watch ordinary life. But this is precisely the point: juxtaposing how willfully ignorant people can go about their daily business while atrocities occur next door. In the distance, we hear faint gunfire, dogs barking and horrifying screams of Jewish people. Even Hedwig’s mother can’t stand the smell and ends her visit early.
Breaking up the monotony is a recurring infrared sequence of a neighboring Polish girl who sneaks out every night to hide scraps of food for the prisoners to eat, though it’s sadly more of a creative interlude than anything that cohesively ties into the narrative. It’s here that we’re visually reminded of Glazer’s bizarre sci-fi thriller “Under the Skin” (2013), where Scarlett Johansson played some sort of alien creature seducing men to their liquid deaths.
In “The Zone of Interest,” Glazer’s greatest directorial touch comes at the end with a masterful cut to present day as custodians clean the camp, which has since been turned into a Holocaust museum. We see them vacuum the floors and dust the glass of showcases containing piles of shoes belonging to the millions of Jewish victims.
Nothing can compare to the actual documentary footage of Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog” (1956) or Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” (1985), but as a narrative film, “The Zone of Interest” can do something those films cannot, which is cut back to a Nazi officer dry heaving with guilt like the genocidal dictator in “The Act of Killing” (2012). After the war, Höss was convicted by the Polish Supreme National Tribunal and hanged on April 16, 1947.
This powerful ending alone makes “The Zone of Interest” a worthy nominee for Best Picture: Drama at Sunday’s Golden Globes, though it’s probably the film least likely to win against Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Celine Song’s “Past Lives.” It is, however, a better film than Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” and Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” so right now it’s my fourth favorite of the bunch.
It’s much more likely to win in the category of Best Non-English Language Film, where oddsmakers are predicting “Anatomy of a Fall” (France), but I’m rooting hard for “Past Lives” (U.S./Korea). Rounding out the category is Aki Kaurismäki’s rom-com “Fallen Leaves” (Finland), Matteo Garrone’s drama “Io capitano” (Italy) and J.A. Bayona’s survival tale “Society of the Snow” (Spain), which premieres on Netflix this weekend if you want to catch up.
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