Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig live calmly and happily with their children in a dream house, surrounded by a garden and swimming pool, enjoying their peaceful swims in the river. The Höss would seem like the portrait of an idyllic family if it were not for the fact that the patriarch serves as commander in Auschwitz and his home is separated by just a fence from the devastating Jewish concentration and extermination camp. The daily routine of that Nazi couple is the focus of The Zone of Interest, a chilling film with which British director Jonathan Glazer observes the Holocaust from the point of view of the perpetrators in a free adaptation of the novel of the same name written by Martin Amis. in 2014.
If the text raised blisters for addressing the extermination in a satirical way, describing a story of love and jealousy between officials of barbarism, the film stands as one of the most precise and harsh films on the subject. And all this without showing the viewer a single scene of violence, in an absolute display of how to suggest through sound, music and off-screen. "I never had the intention of recreating any atrocity visually. The idea was to speak to the viewer about the human capacity for violence, which we have as a species, and also about the familiarity of the perpetrators. It was about seeing these people not as anomalies, but as their neighbors, normal people who ended up becoming mass murderers and were so dissociated from their crimes that they did not see them as such," says Glazer in a press conference via videoconference.
It had been ten years since the director had made a feature film since Under the Skin, a cult film in which Scarlett Johansson was a deadly alien. He had previously filmed the more discreet Reincarnation and Sexy Beast. With The Zone of Interest he takes a giant step in his short filmography in a film that hits Spanish theaters this Friday, is aiming for the Oscar for the United Kingdom and has already dazzled in its premiere at the Cannes Festival, where it won the Grand Prize. Jury Prize. Precisely, one day after its official screening at the festival, the death of Amis at the age of 73 due to esophageal cancer was announced.
Born into a Jewish family, Glazer had been searching for a different way to approach the Holocaust for some time when he came across Amis's book. "I read it three or four times in nine years, it seemed like a brave attempt and in a way it helped me know what I wanted to tell. I never had the intention of making an adaptation, it was more of a spark that led me to investigate about the real character who inspired Amis to be his fictional commander. What he had written was clearly based on the real Auschwitz commander, Rudolf Höss, so I started reading about him and, by extension, about his wife, his private world." .
In order to film a story at the service of authenticity, the filmmaker relied on home photographs of the Nazi criminal to design the set fifty meters from an Auschwitz extermination camp that he was afraid to visit, now converted into a museum. He hid several microcameras and filmed without the actors - magnificent Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel - even knowing where the equipment was. "There was definitely a power and concentration that came with that proximity and I'm convinced that atmosphere is in every pixel of the film," he admits.
The Höss we see in the film reads stories to his children at night and behaves like an exemplary father, while a few meters away he is in command of the deadliest extermination camp in the Third Reich, with more than a million dead. After his arrest, he justified himself by arguing that he was following orders. A guy with a woman even more ruthless than him. We see her walking through the garden with her baby, observing the beautiful flowers. He proudly shows the house to his guests, a macabre dwelling from which his own mother flees without saying a word and in which children play with the gold teeth of murdered Jews.
Hedwig is so happy in that place that she begs her husband to stay when they propose a change of destination. They have built their home just a wall away from the horror, the gas chambers and a crematorium that spits out ashes that end up in the river where the family bathes. Mundane scenes with which Glazer carries out a dissection of that "banality of evil" that the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt coined to affirm that people capable of committing great atrocities can be perfectly normal people. The Hösses have become accustomed to the sound of gunshots and screams in the distance, the smoke billowing from the crematorium, and the stench of death.
In a world ravaged by several wars, Glazer confesses that the only point in making this film was for it to have to do with current events and provoke reflection on a violent way of acting that remains unchanged in human beings: "I think we have to evolve out of our capacity for violence. I refuse to believe that we cannot get out of this, but it is absolutely necessary that each of us has to face it. The film is about our capacity and the possibility of each of us being a perpetrator , about what we choose to love, with whom we choose to empathize and with whom we decide not to. It is a very complex set of circumstances. But I think that fundamentally it is an internal examination. The film tries to unconsciously connect with the viewer."
That's why he made The Zone of interest to today's audiences, as a warning. "We try to look at these people as if they were our neighbors. It's about our capacity for violence and complicity in it. How we dissociate from the horrors of the world to protect our own mental state, our safety, our luxury and our elections." And he ditches: “It will get us nowhere if we continue to think of ourselves as victims and look at others as perpetrators.” The lessons of history are not always learned, evil still abounds in the imperfect 21st century.
