利害之畿

只有BBC的自然地理纪录片才会有这样鲜活而真实的外景，只有艾森豪威尔时代的美术设计会将明媚的色彩、现代波普极简主义结合起来，是美国50年代的情景喜剧，饱含着现实乐观与传统主义，这与我们之前看过的任何战争题材电影都不同，因为当场景切换到现代的历史博物馆时，我们只能通过理性来认识这一变化，马丁艾米斯恐怕对此哑口无言，这种享受是文字无法带来的。
和同年的《可怜的东西》一样，他们都拥有前卫的镜头理念，经典的倾斜镜头用于表现道德的失衡感，微角度俯视镜头表示审视感，房屋狭窄和拥挤的效果象征潜意识里的痛苦。假如我们把电影三维的空间假设为一个正方体，《利益区域》最精彩的部分便是将摄影机布置在了对角线的截面上，使观众理论上拥有了多种平面视角：左、中、右，上、下，棱角分明的画面使它的态度相较于欧格斯兰斯莫斯的凸面镜要严肃得多，对此最容易的解释便是历史理性主义，我们很难在战争电影中寻求理智，暴力和伤痛都是最大的阻力，而从影像角度乔纳森格雷泽已经另辟蹊径了。
我们在自己身边可以发现无时无刻不存在的，凭借高尚口号宣传战争的电影，也可以在邻居家的动画工作室里找到温柔的和平倡议者，他们面向未来，当然大洋彼岸的伤痛题材是我们非常熟悉的，这些都是我们熟悉的战争电影。而《利益区域》则察觉到了感性角度的局限性-阐释语境的不明和主观的导向，所以采取了也许死板，但是绝对公平、高明的手段-施暴者视角（为了反战的便利，无需多言）、战争暴行和悲剧抽象（但是明晰）与具象（但是模糊）[注：元素的调和] 的暗示、以及和平安宁、美满幸福的主体。电影是放在现在的，我们过着平常的生活，悲剧在围墙之外，这是最安全和平静的反战手段，审视、反思，让任何一方激进者都哑口无言的展览橱窗。

“自然地理”外景

艾森豪威尔时代的美术设计（1）

艾森豪威尔时代的美术设计（2）

镜头的审视和潜意识的痛苦

现代主义的倾斜镜头

严肃的镜头和历史理性主义

好莱坞记者报影评：

‘The Zone of Interest’ Review: Jonathan Glazer’s Audacious Film Is a Bone-Chilling Holocaust Drama Like No Other

Loosely adapted from the Martin Amis novel, the Brit director’s fourth feature focuses on a camp commandant’s family living their bucolic dream life just over the wall from Auschwitz.

BYDAVID ROONEY

MAY 19, 2023 11:00AM

'The Zone of Interest' CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

At this point it doesn’t seem a stretch to say that Jonathan Glazer is incapable of making a movie that’s anything less than bracingly original. His 2000 feature debut, Sexy Beast, elevated the British gangster thriller. Four years later, his reincarnation mystery, Birth, got a cool response from most critics but has since been steadily re-evaluated as a spellbinding heir to Rosemary’s Baby. Almost a decade later, he returned with the hypnotically austere sci-fi chiller Under the Skin, about an alien succubus preying on Scottish men and discovering empathy during her killing spree.

Glazer’s new German-language film, The Zone of Interest, which comes after another 10-year absence from features, is a devastating Holocaust drama like no other, which demonstrates with startling effectiveness the British formalist’s unerring control of tonal and visual storytelling. The worst thing you could say about the director is that for such a singular talent, he’s frustratingly unprolific. Or perhaps that’s why his films are so unique.

Adapting Martin Amis’ 2014 novel by radically pruning and reshaping the entire plot and narrowing its gaze to just one of the three narrators, Glazer transforms the book’s fictionalized protagonist into the real-life SS officer he was inspired by, Rudolf Höss. The longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Höss was a leading force in perfecting the techniques of mass extermination implemented during the acceleration of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

The other key element retained is the setting that gives both book and film their title. The area in question is the roughly 25 square miles immediately surrounding Auschwitz in western Poland.

The euphemistic nature of the term fits the themes of compartmentalization and denial in Glazer’s film, explored through the bucolic existence of Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, the revelation from Toni Erdmann) and their five children just over the wall from the camp, within hearing distance of where unspeakable atrocities are being committed. That juxtaposition seems the very essence of what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil,” perfectly captured in the cast’s naturalistic performances.

The movie tacitly makes the important distinction between obliviousness and simple refusal to acknowledge the endorsement of mass murder as anything but patriotic adherence to the party line. The echoes of that kind of ethical pliancy in many political landscapes across the world today go without saying.

Working with Polish cinematographer Łukasz Żal, who shot Pawel Pawlikowski’s beautiful black-and-white companion pieces Ida and Cold War, Glazer embedded remotely operated cameras in production designer Chris Oddy’s reconstruction of the Höss residence. They shot simultaneously on up to 10 cameras in different rooms using no film lights and allowing the actors to move unobstructed.

This dovetails with the visual scheme outside in the extensive garden — Hedwig’s pride and joy with its greenhouse, fruit trees and vegetable patches, all of it carefully landscaped according to historical records. The film unfolds predominantly in fixed wide shots under natural light, establishing a detached observational style that somehow makes its scrutiny more chilling.

Likewise, the unsettling use of Mica Levi’s music, which follows the experimental composer’s nerve-shredding work on Under the Skin in fusing score with ambient sound, thinking about film music in boundary-pushing new ways. The movie’s prologue and coda feature a few minutes of black screen, broken only by the words of the title at the start and accompanied by Levi’s score, murky and malevolent at first, then exploding into a terrifying cacophony at the end. The film is punctuated intermittently by violent blasts of horns that sound like the wounded cries of other-worldly animals.

The Höss family is first seen picnicking by the river on a sunny day with friends, and the camera often captures them in the garden, celebrating a birthday or splashing in the pool at a party. The clear visibility (and presumably the smell) of smoke billowing from the camp’s crematoriums and the sound of prisoners screaming, guard dogs barking or officers ordering executions seem not even to register. All the horror becomes almost like the background noise of a TV left on in another room of a house.

But rather than normalizing the family’s apparent imperviousness to the atrocities, the choice to remain entirely on the civilian side of the wall makes the nightmare more gut-wrenching. What’s unseen often is more frightening. Even the fact that scarcely a word of Hitlerian rhetoric is spoken makes the cold reality of it all hit harder.

Glazer’s script moves adroitly between ordinary snapshots of Höss family domesticity — Hedwig laughing with other officers’ wives around the kitchen table about her unpaid Jewish housemaids as if they aren’t there; Rudolf routinely closing and locking each door at night; one of their young sons playing alone in his room, not even flinching at the noise of a prisoner being shot — and the patriarch’s professional responsibilities, such as an informal business meeting in which he and his colleagues discuss optimal methods for high-volume incineration.

Only in rare instances does the reality of the death camp intrude forcefully on their consciousness, notably during an afternoon Rudolf spends fishing and canoeing on the river with his kids. Aghast to realize the water’s surface is sprinkled with the ash of burned bodies, he hurries the children inside to be scrubbed clean.

The film’s strangest and most haunting interludes unfold over the sound of Rudolf reading bedtime stories. The visuals switch to thermal imaging, showing a young girl doing her bit for the Jewish partisan movement, sneaking out at night to pick apples and pears and leave them where prisoners can find them.

The conflict that ruptures the family’s contentment comes when Rudolf gets word that he’s being transferred to head office, near Berlin, a move that he protests to no avail. Hedwig is enraged that he waits to tell her until any hope of reversing the decision is gone, reminding him that living away from the city with space to breathe has been their dream since they were 17. Her anger spills out during a momentary annoyance with a maid, spitting out that she could have her husband sprinkle the woman’s ashes in a field.

In the high-level meetings that follow, Rudolf spearheads procedure for handling a massive influx of Hungarian Jews, as if he were managing any ordinary factory shipment. Reporting the news of Himmler’s approval to Hedwig later, he says, “I’m pleased as Punch!” These glimpses of standard bureaucracy and infrastructure being applied without a flicker of emotion to genocidal extermination make your blood run cold.

Glazer saves the sole exposure to what’s beyond the wall in Auschwitz for last, with a time shift and a brief detour into documentary that recalls the unblinking gaze of Alain Resnais’ landmark 1956 short film, Night and Fog. The sickening blunt impact is heightened by the quotidian nature of everything going on around what we’re seeing, and the eruption of Levi’s music that follows is like an alarm going off, reminding us to remain alert to the cyclical loops of history.