We finally watched The Zone of Interest!

MONDAY, APRIL 15, 2024

Saying what we saw: Over the weekend, we finally saw The Zone of Interest. The leading authority on the film offers this overview:

The Zone of Interest is a 2023 historical drama film written and directed by Jonathan Glazer...Loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis, the film focuses on the life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, who live with their family in a home in the "Zone of Interest" next to the concentration camp.

Such was the subject matter. At this year's Oscars, it was nominated for Best Picture. It won the Oscar for Best International Feature.

On the whole, the film was very favorably reviewed, but there were also some dissenters and disagreements. To wit:

At the Washington Post, Ann Hornaday gave it four stars out of four, as you can see right here. (Long ago, we became a fan for life when she praised the girl-friendly classic, Blue Crush.)

 At the New York Times, the formal review by Mahnola Dargis appears online beneath this dual headline. Things go downhill from there:

‘The Zone of Interest’ Review: The Holocaust, Reduced to Background Noise
Jonathan Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

That sounds like very few stars. Below, you see the headline which appeared in print editions, along with the end of the Dargis review:

Ignoring The Abyss That Sits Next Door

[...]

In “The Zone of Interest,” Glazer doesn’t simply tell a story; in his use of art-film conventions he provides a specific frame through which to watch it. This is clearly part of its attraction as is the breathing space his approach creates: it is scary, but not too.

These conventions can create a sense of intellectual distance and serve as a critique, or that’s the idea. They also announce (fairly or not) a filmmaker’s aesthetic bona fides, seriousness, sophistication and familiarity with a comparatively rarefied cinematic tradition. They signal that the film you’re watching is different from popular ones made for a mass audience. These conventions are markers of distinction, of quality, which flatter filmmakers and viewers alike, and which finally seem to me to be the biggest point of this vacuous movie.

In Dargis' view, the director's high-end pomposity and flattery seem to be the biggest point of "his vacuous film."

That review was extremely negative. That doesn't mean it was "wrong."

Three months later, perhaps in a bit of a make-good call, the Times published a guest essay by David Klion—an essay praising the film. 

Yesterday, we read the essay after watching the film. The following passage reinforced what we ourselves had thought as we sat and watched:

The Oscar Contender That Won’t Let Us Look Away

[...]

While the film does not ask that we empathize with the Hösses, the conventions of storytelling dictate that we can’t help but identify with them. Some critics have called this approach hollow or even kitschy, an over-aestheticized art house stunt that tells us nothing new about Auschwitz. “The Zone of Interest” has made many of its more sympathetic critics uncomfortable, and that’s by design. “For me, this is not a film about the past,” Mr. Glazer told The Guardian. “It’s trying to be about now, and about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims.”

The film isn't about those perpetrators, the director had said. The film is about us. The film is about our own similarity to them!

That was largely what we drew away as we watched the slow-moving film with the largely illegible subtitles. 

Those perpetrators built up walls to block their view of their victims and of their own behavior. That's the role our current tribal clans routinely play, even for us all tangled up in Blue, on this side of so many walls.

We look away from Gotham's lower-income public school kids. We look away from the (almost wholly) disregarded people in Gaza.

Instead, we posture and pose and we preen and perform. We may do some whistling of our own. In such ways, we cement ourselves as the good and decent, plainly intelligent people. 

Even here among us Blues, we tend to avert our gaze from the disregarded. Those were the thoughts which flashed through our heads as we watched the slow-moving film.

People are dying all over the globe. Some get mentioned, most do not.

Should we think about changing the names of our birds? It's a front-page report in the Times!