Jonathan Glazer doesn’t make feature films very often, but when he does, we get unforgettable work like The area of interest (now streaming on Max, in addition to VOD services such as Amazon Prime Video). The acclaimed director of sexy beast, Birth and Under the skin I spent years researching and preparing to make this banal story of evil about Rudolf Hoss, the Nazi commander who was not only in charge of the Auschwitz concentration camp, but also lived right next door to it. Aiming to eliminate as much of the “cinematic artifice” as possible, Glazer installed multiple static cameras inside a detailed replica of Hoss’s house, built very close to the real one, which still stands, and let his cast It simply “exists” on set, the Hoss family going about their suburban routine as the sounds of genocide creep over a fence and into their idyllic garden. The film is nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Director, and, like so many Holocaust films before it, it’s one of those films that you’ll appreciate on many levels and be glad you saw, but probably never want to see again. .
THE AREA OF INTEREST: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: Location, location, location. Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Huller, Oscar nominated for Anatomy of a fall) Hoss doesn’t live in an extravagant house, but it’s still beautiful. Her daughters’ room is cozy and bright, Rudolf’s office is majestic and the dining room is grand. The piece de resistance, however, is the garden, which is Hedwig’s pride: it stretches across some plots and includes a swimming pool for children to play in, a wide persity of flowering plants (including towering rows of sunflowers ) and an extensive greenhouse. We first meet the Hoss family, who look exceedingly pale in the sunlight along the shore of a lake. It’s a wonderful day. They have taken their two sons, two daughters and their baby swimming and picnicking. When they arrive home, the crickets sing in the twilight, the soothing chirping mixing with the not-too-distant sounds of gunshots, screams, diesel engines, and other sounds of the systematic genocide industry.
It’s Rudolf’s birthday. The children are delighted to give him a three-person kayak, so new the paint is still fresh. He puts the baby inside and laughs that he will have a green bottom. All the Auschwitz camp officials gather outside Rudolf’s back door to wish him a happy birthday; The superiors will meet later in his home office to go over the plans for his new, highly efficient mass cremation system. When he has a rare day off, he takes two of the children to nearby Soln for a kayak ride. As they swim and he wades into the river with his fishing rod, he steps on something. It’s a human jaw. He runs out of the water and takes the children home, where the nanny and housekeeper scrub them in the bathtub, cleaning away any remaining ash. At night, Rudolf makes his rounds, turning off lights and closing doors. In a bedroom, he and Hedwig laugh and giggle quietly in their single beds, separated by a nightstand; In another, his eldest son lies in bed with a flashlight, examining a box of gold teeth.
Hedwig’s mother arrives to visit, the first to the house in Auschwitz. Hedwig gives him a guided tour of the garden (a “paradisiacal garden,” as her mother calls it) and they sit near a beautiful pergola, not hearing, or pretending not to hear, the creaks of industry. of death waving a few meters away, on the other side of a high privacy fence topped with barbed wire like Christ’s crown of thorns. They organize a party and we get a photo of the children splashing in the pool while we see columns of smoke advancing across the horizon from a train arriving at the camp; From the opposite angle, brick buildings housing gas chambers and ovens loom ominously. As they sit by the pool, Rudolf tells Hedwig that he has been so successful supervising Auschwitz that he has been promoted from commander to deputy inspector. They will have to move to Oranienburg, in Germany. Hedwig is outraged. Have you seen her garden? Have you seen how happy the children are? This is her dream, she argues, and it’s even better than they ever thought it would be. Why would anyone want to leave this?
What movies will it remind you of?: Archive The area of interest with Michael Haneke The white ribbon one of modern cinema’s most miserably effective examinations of the worst of humanity.
Performance worth seeing: Between this and Anatomy of a fall2023 marked a banner year for Huller. Both films gave him a platform to explore compellingly thorny morally gray areas; in The area of interesthis characterization is all about fascinatingly superhuman feats of compartmentalization.
Memorable dialogue: Rudolf takes his son for a horseback ride in the forest. As the sounds of the Auschwitz camp enter the scene, Rudolf points something out to the boy: “Do you hear that? He is a bittern. A Eurasian gray heron.”
Sex and skin: None.
Our opinion: The area of interest begins with a black screen and an overture of ambient music, which functions as a palate cleanser for what we are about to see: a family going about their daily activities. Children play with toy soldiers, the nanny sits with her head in her hands while the baby cries in the early morning, women chat while drinking tea, a father reads his daughters a bedtime story. But one of the boys wears the Hitler Youth uniform. The sound of the furnaces belching smoke and flames has awakened the boy. The women talk casually about buying a dress from a “Jew.” The history is Hansel and Greteland we specifically hear the part where the children push the witch into the oven.
Sometimes we have to block out problematic thoughts just to get through the workday, put dinner on the table, and get the kids to bed. But the Hoss family is a different story. The children are collateral damage, while the adults function on a different level, especially Hedwig. While her husband ventures to the other side of the fence daily, she does not, leading us to wonder if complicity or indifference is worse. Most people get used to the best and worst of the new environment; Having become accustomed to living in boiling water, Rudolf and Hedwig have become truly inhuman. Cue a tremendously prosaic scene: Rudolf makes a phone call and dictates a memo to the farm workers. He wants you to please be mindful not to destroy the lilac bushes while picking flowers. We recognize the crude irony of the moment. He?
Glazer never shows us what happens on the other side of the fence. He doesn’t have to do it: we have seen it in Schindler’s List, Life is Beautiful, Son of Saul and others. In this film, however, the idea that what’s in our imaginations is scarier than what we witness firsthand remains truer than ever. The cinematography functions as a harsh gaze, as if the camera was trying to force its subjects to recognize reality, to reflect on themselves. The director tells parallel stories: The one we see, a quasi-observational, austere and unblinking family drama. And the one we hear, a story of terror and condemnation of these characters (for this reason, the film is nominated for the Oscar for best sound). These narratives cross our minds so often because we are not evil and we try to wish that it would happen to Hedwig and Rudolf, perhaps because we value stories of redemption even when there are none.
Not the entire film is chillingly astringent. Glazer deviates from the formality of static camera and natural light in some scenes depicting Polish Jews whose faces go virtually unnoticed: a girl, shot with reverse negative photographs, hides apples for starving prisoners; a lament played on a piano is subject to subtitles, instrumental music translated into words; a late cinematic sequence that flashes forward to present-day Auschwitz. History judges. Not everything is desperate and not everything is forgotten.
Our call: The area of interest It is an exceptional film and difficult to endure. The most vital stories are usually like this. TRANSMIT IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
