FILM FRIDAY: The Zone of Interest

The joy of unsettling art

spoilers ahead

Deadline done, half-term looming, I need a few hours to decompress. The best way for me to unwind is nearly always a solo trip to the cinema. Ever since I worked at one in my student days with the perk of free films, I’ve always found solace within the dark confines of a screen. There is peace and desire in being an audience. Entertain me, I am saying with an £8.10 ticket. I buy a coffee and popcorn but it’s not through salt, sugar or froth that I look for refreshment, but in the alchemy taking place up on screen.

Decompress, my mind says. And so I head off to see this. (I’ve always been weird.)

Jonathan Grazer’s The Zone of Interest is cold, precise, calculating; exactly like its subject matter. A Nazi commandant lives with his family adjoining Auschwitz, the camp’s wall the boundary for their Eden-like garden, of which Rudolf’s wife Hedwig is the commandant. She tends her roses and azaleas with care, all the while screams, barks, shots sound behind her. Clothes from inmates are brought to the house for the family to pick over, Hedwig plucking for herself a beautiful fur coat, but we never see the Jews who inhabited them. They are kept away, out of sight, giving the film an odd, nightmarish quality that is hard to describe. We feel the horrors, we know the horrors, without ever seeing the horrors themselves. There are no gimmicks here or easy plays for attention. We know this story, don’t we? We know how it will end. Instead of gas chambers, we see a family spending their weekends swimming and fishing, buying each other presents, laughing together in bed. And yet the horror is there, made alive through being so ordinary. A teenage boy struts around by day in the uniform of the Nazi youth, at night playing in bed with pulled teeth. He delights in locking his younger brother in the greenhouse, an act we would excuse as normal - an elder sibling’s first taste of power - if it were not for the similarities with what the adults are doing over the wall. Hedwig’s mother comes to visit and as they admire the garden, they muse for a brief, careless moment whether the mother’s neighbour and former employer is now in the camp. They shrug. The mother is annoyed she was outbid in the street auction for the woman’s curtains. ‘I loved those curtains,’ she says. At night, the mother sees the smoking chimneys. She flees, leaving a note for her daughter which is subsequently burned in the stove. Perhaps there is a prick of conscience here, a basic acknowledgement that we the audience are begging the characters to feel, but the letter is not shown. Glazer does not want us sympathising with Nazis. But more telling is the realisation that their own emotions cannot be spoken aloud. They must be written down, left behind, burned in the fire with shame. Hedwig reacts to this letter by berating the maid, telling her that if she - Hedwig - wanted, she could have her husband scatter the maid’s ashes on the fields. Her sadness at her mother’s departure must be smothered with a reminder of her own power. At least she is in control of herself. These are basic human emotions, making it all the harder to watch. It is exquisite in its clinical depiction of detachment.

Was all of Nazi Germany simply evil? Or is the answer far more evil in its banality: that a desire to be the best, most powerful, and seek meaning through one’s identity (indeed, the general spirit of our times…perhaps every time?) can be the most dangerous human desire of all. Even if we do unite through a shared identity, it does not mean an end to chasing power. After a Nazi party at which he looks down on his comrades from above, Rudolf tells Hedwig that he spent most of the time working out the best way to gas the room. There is potentially no end to the desire for domination.

My favourite kind of art and entertainment is unsettling. Especially in cinema. Exiting a dark auditorium into daylight, rejoining the real world, unsettled by the knowledge that the one you’ve just experienced was also real… I drove from the cinema to collect my kids from school in a weird daze, almost offended by the everyday sound of the car’s indicator. Because SOUND in this film. Oh my goodness, the SOUND. No music, just long odd notes that sound off at random. In the background, the constant sound of the camp. A close-up of one of Hedwig’s red and beautifully-tended roses fills the screen like blood, set to a crescendo of screams. It is distressing and rightly so. Glazer will not spare us the horror.

It seems almost repulsive to experience a film like this and feel that weird warmth I get in my stomach when a piece of art resonates. An excitement at tapping into an energy I rarely get to feel. This is, for me, the power of cinema. I want to shout to the filmmaker I GET IT. You got me. You’ve shown me humanity in all its gory, gross form. Ignore the silly people leaving half way through. They don’t get it but I DO. I’m your person. ME. The feeling is heightened through the knowledge that this newly-opened window will soon shut. As I begin to forget details, as I spend longer back in my real world, my fingers lose the ability to brush against that one. The one that cost me a bargain £8.10.

If this makes me bonkers then I’m happy to be mad.

I type this now while my kids scream from the garden, and what do I feel? Irritation. They are interrupting my flow. How utterly wonderful to have the chance to be irritated, I realise after having watched this film. To be so thoroughly spoilt in life that I can feel such a wasteful, indulgent emotion. Oh, be quiet, the creative part of my brain thinks. I am writing.

As if writing is more important than their tiny little worlds.