THE ZONE OF INTEREST: next door to the unthinkable

Photo caption: Sandra Huller in THE ZONE OF INTEREST. Courtesy of A24.

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is an exceptionally original and well made, intentionally unsettling and, ultimately, unnecessary film.

We first meet Hedwig (the great Sandra Huller), Rudolph (Christian Friedel) and their five children in 1943 on an idyllic riverside picnic in the woods.  They return to their spacious villa and put the kids to bed (Hedwig firmly and Rudolph gently).  When Hedwig and Rudolph are in bed themselves, they ignore what sounds like shouting and the barking of guard dogs nearby.  

The next morning we see that Rudolph is the commandant of Auschwitz and the family home is LITERALLY next door to the walls.  Hedwig, like any hausfrau, hangs laundered sheets to dry, while her groceries are delivered by death camp slave labor. 

As the family’s domestic life goes on, the soundtrack slowly becomes louder and includes more shots, screams and the drone of industrial extermination.  We see more of the skyline, with smokestacks spewing fire and ash.

Glazer slips in little matter-of-fact horrors like perverse Easter Eggs. Hedwig brags to her gal pals about furs and other luxuries she has stolen from dead Jews. Hedwig seems meaner than Rudolph and coldly utters what must be the most terrifying threat ever made to a maid.

Having married a guy who has risen to be a big boss, Hedwig is living her best life, with servants and plenty of perks, like Italian spa vacations.  She has the very disturbing capacity to shut out the hellish enterprise over her back fence, replete with the sounds, smells and images of workaday genocide. Glazer has made a Holocaust film without any images from inside the death camp; the Holocaust is just kind of leaking over the fence.

The Martin Amis novel that Glazer adapted into the screenplay did not name the commandant and his wife, but Glazer uses the names of the actual historical figures: the real Rudolph and Hedwig Hoss.  When one reads about the real Hoss, you can see the care with which Glazer depicts him, down to his distinctive haircut, the kids’ names and Hedwig’s dream of spacious gardens (She’s the true believer in lebensraum.)

Rudolph is not a hate-spewing frothing maniac, more of a Company Man go-getter.  One can imagine a 1960s version of Rudolph driving to surpass this quarter’s IBM sales goal. Yet, this is the man who admitted to murdering 2.5 million people; the other million, he said, died of disease and starvation.

The Zone of Interest is an extraordinary illustration of the banality of evil. But why do we need it?  Hannah Arendt’s recognition that Hitler’s mad horrors were not carried out by monsters, but by the ordinary and mediocre, has been generally accepted for decades. If Hitler were obsessed with dairy production or ceramic art, thousands of workaday Nazis would have been content to do just that, instead.  The logical conclusion is that the Holocaust doesn’t need a maniac to happen again, just millions of people who obey the maniac. After all, it was ordinary-looking American companies that vied for Trump Administration contracts to put migrant babies in cages, not some survivalist militia.

It’s a familiar truism, and, to my sensibilities, not worth the unpleasantness of sitting watching these unpleasant people and their unthinkable deeds. That being said, this is anything but a slog. The Zone of Interest is captivating throughout (not unlike a vehicular crash).

This is only Glazer’s fourth feature in 24 years: Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004), Under the Skin (2013).

The Zone of Interest has been nominated for multiple Oscars, including Best Picture.

PERSIAN LESSONS: walking the tightrope

Photo caption: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart in PERSIAN LESSONS. Photo courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

The Holocaust thriller Persian Lessons walks a tightrope of tension, and the ending is very emotionally powerful. Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) is a Belgian Jew sent to a German concentration camp. He seeks to avoid death by claiming to be Persian named Reza. He is not anticipating that a Nazi officer will demand to be taught Farsi. That officer, Koch (Lars Eidinger), aspires to a postwar future as a Tehran restaurateur.

Gilles/Reza, who doesn’t know ANY Farsi, must invent an entire faux Farsi language, word-by-word, and remember it. All the while, he’s sweating out the likelihood that his ruse will be discovered.

The blustery Koch, with his Persian fixation, is an oddball. A chef when he opportunistically joined the Nazi Party, he’s not a True Believer, although he is very comfortable with genocide. In another time or place, he could have easily been a corrupt official or a mafioso. While Gilles/Reza is the protagonist, the story rises and falls on Koch’s whims, and Eidinger’s performance is excellent.

Nazis were bullies at their core, and some of Persian Lessons’ lighter moments are when Gilles/Reza is offscreen and the Nazis’ own foibles, with their sexual peccadilloes and their petty internal power plays, are on display. There’s an especially funny scene when Koch gets a leg up on his boss, the camp’s Commandant.

Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Lars Eidinger in PERSIAN LESSONS. Photo courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

Persian Lessons was directed by Ukrainian-born Vadim Perelman (2003’s Oscar nominated House of Sand and Fog). Belarus tried to submit Persian Lessons for an Academy Award, but it was too international to qualify as a Belarus film. IMDb catalogues it as a Russian/German/Belarus film; Biscayart is Argentine, Eidinger is German, and screenwriter Ilja Zofin is Russian.

I screened Persian Lessons for its North American premiere at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in July 2021. It opens June 9 at the Laemmle Royal in LA and more widely on June 16, including San Francisco’s Opera Plaza and the Landmark Pasadena.

SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD: immune from shame

SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD. Courtesy of Vanessa Lapa.

In her absorbing documentary Speer Goes to Hollywood, filmmaker Vanessa Lapa takes us inside a Nazi war criminal’s brazen attempt to rehabilitate his image into “the Good Nazi”. Previously unheard private audio recordings of Albert Speer himself reveal him to be one of history’s most audacious spin doctors.

Speer, the highest ranking Nazi to escape execution at the Nuremberg Trials, was the master of the Nazis’ wartime production efforts. A trained architect, any ability Speer had to design structures was surpassed by his genius in logistics. In Speer Goes to Hollywood, Speer displays an ever greater gift for dissembling.

After being released from prison in the mid 1960’s, Speer published a bestselling (and self-serving) memoir, Inside the Third Reich, to perpetuate what is known as The Speer Myth. Speer would have us believe that the worst crimes in history occurred – right under his nose and to his benefit – without any participation on his part. Speer’s defense was essentially, “Hey, it was the OTHER Nazis“.

(Note: not even a liar as bald-faced as Speer denied that the Holocaust happened.)

To supply the German war machine, Speer exploited the nearly limitless pool of those conquered, persecuted and to be exterminated by the Nazis. Powering his production with forced labor, Speer enslaved 12.5 million victims and worked many of them to death, all to perpetrate a war of aggression.

In the tapes, we hear Speer collaborating with Andrew Birkin, a Stanley Kubrick protege, on the script for a film to further Speer’s version of history. In the face of damning evidence, Speer never wavered in his deflections, dodges and denials. Speer Goes to Hollywood reveals Albert Speer to stay on message with unmatched relentlessness, discipline and audacity.

Andrew Birkin was trying to cash in on the popularity of Inside the Thrd Reich. The tapes show Birkin to be stunningly enabling in the attempted whitewash. Once Birkin slips and blames a kerfuffle on “the Jewish machine”.

Another Birkin mentor, Carol Reed is the truth teller. Reed, the director of The Third Man, gives Birkin a reality check – this IS a whitewash, pure and simple.

A prime example of the banality of evil, Speer doesn’t seem to be a fanatic hater, but an amoral grasper/climber, willing to swallow even genocide as an acceptable price for getting ahead. He does display an ingrained antisemitism, once tossing off “Of course, we resented the Jews“, as if, who wouldn’t?

Here’s a tantalizing nugget from Speer Goes to Hollywood. We hear Speer claim to have written the top Nuremberg prosecutor, American Robert Jackson, to claim important knowledge of Germany’s neurological warfare research, using it as leverage to avoid being turned over to the Soviets. Speer hints at an implied quid pro quo, but given Speer’s credibility, who knows if any of it is true.

The ever-watchable Speer Going to Hollywood chronicles unashamedness on a mass scale.

DVD/Stream of the Week: IDA – something to compare with this year’s best

Ida

The big Prestige Movies are arriving in theaters and Oscar campaigns are being launched, so this week I’m giving you a movie that you can compare to 2017’s Oscar Bait the recent Polish drama Ida.

The title character is a novice nun who has been raised in a convent orphanage. Just before she is to take her vows in the early 1960s, she is told for the first time that she has an aunt. She meets the aunt, and Ida learns that she is the survivor of a Jewish family killed in the Holocaust. The aunt takes the novice on an odd couple road trip to trace the fate of their family.

The chain-smoking aunt (Agata Kulesza) is a judge who consumes vast quantities of vodka to self-medicate her own searing memories. But the most profound difference isn’t that the aunt is a hard ass and that the nun is prim and devout. The most important contrast is between their comparative worldliness – the aunt has been around the block and the novice is utterly naive and inexperienced (both literally and figuratively virginal). The young woman must make the choice between a future that follows her upbringing or one which her biological heritage opens to her. As Ida unfolds, her family legacy makes her choice an informed one.

The novice Ida, played by newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska, is very quiet – but hardly fragile. Saying little, she takes in the world with a penetrating gaze and a just-under-the-surface magnetic strength.

Superbly photographed in black and white, each shot is exquisitely composed. Watching shot after shot in Ida is like walking through a museum gazing at masterpiece paintings one after the other. Ida was directed and co-written by Pawel Pawlikowski, who also recently directed the British coming of age story My Summer of Love (with Emily Blunt) and the French thriller The Woman in the Fifth (with Kristin Scott Thomas and Ethan Hawke). He is an effective and economic story-teller, packing textured characters and a compelling story into an 80 minute film.

Ida is also successful in avoiding grimness. Pawlikowski has crafted a story which addresses the pain of the characters without being painful to watch. There’s some pretty fun music from a touring pop/jazz combo and plenty of wicked sarcasm from the aunt.

Ida won 2015 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture and the International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Ida was my pick as the best film at Cinequest, where it won the Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature.

Ida is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

FEVER AT DAWN: romance, identity and a moral choice

FEVER AT DAWN
FEVER AT DAWN

The Hungarian drama Fever at Dawn is a little movie with an epic romance. Set just after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, Hungarian invalids who survived the camps have been sent to convalesce in hospital camps in Sweden. A young patient, Miklos, gets a dire diagnosis and determines to find love once more before he dies. A half century before internet dating, he concocts a scheme to get himself in front of every sick Hungarian woman in Sweden. When he meets his potential soulmate Lili, a moral question rises to the surface – should he share his diagnosis with the woman he is courting?

Some Holocaust survivors experienced ambivalence about the very Jewish identity that led to yellow stars on their clothes and, essentially, targets on their backs. This ambivalence becomes a significant thread of Fever at Dawn and is addressed more explicitly than is common for Holocaust (or post-Holocaust) movies.

Don’t read too much about this movie before seeing it. There’s an unexpected nugget at the end.

I saw Fever at Dawn earlier this year at its US premiere at Cinequest.  It’s being featured at this years San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SJFF36), where you can see it at San Francisco’s Castro on July 26, at the Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theater on July 28, and at CineArts in Palo Alto on July 29.

Cinequest: FEVER AT DAWN

FEVER AT DAWN
FEVER AT DAWN

The Hungarian drama Fever at Dawn is a little movie with an epic romance.  Set just after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps,  Hungarian invalids who survived the camps have been sent to convalesce in hospital camps in Sweden.  A young patient, Miklos, gets a dire diagnosis and determines to find love once more before he dies.  A half century before internet dating, he concocts a scheme to get himself in front of every sick Hungarian woman in Sweden.  When he meets his potential soulmate Lili, a moral question rises to the surface – should he share his diagnosis?

Some Holocaust survivors experienced ambivalence about the Jewish identity that led to yellow stars on their clothes and, essentially, targets on their backs.   This ambivalence becomes a significant thread of Fever at Dawn and is addressed more explicitly than usual for a Holocaust (or post-Holocaust)  movies.

Don’t read too much about this movie before seeing it.  There’s an unexpected nugget at the end.

Fever at Dawn’s US Premiere will be on March 2 at Cinequest, with additional Cinequest screenings on March 3, 7 and 9.

ONE DAY IN AUSCHWITZ: an individual, personal testimony

Kitty Hart-Moxon in ONE DAY IN AUSCHWITZ
Kitty Hart-Moxon in ONE DAY IN AUSCHWITZ

Kitty Hart-Moxon is an elderly Holocaust survivor now living in the UK. In One Day in Auschwitz, she takes two seventeen-year-old girls – the same age that she entered the famed Nazi concentration camp – to Auschwitz. She guides them around the camp and narrates her experiences there.  We already know about the horrors, but her matter-of-fact testimony helps us appreciate the extra lengths that the Nazis took to dehumanize, in addition to murdering, their victims.  It’s a very personal account and a compelling one.

One Day in Auschwitz is now playing on Showtime.

DVD/Stream of the Week: IDA

IdaThe Polish drama Ida, which I first saw at this year’s Cinequest, is now available on video.  I currently rate it as (next to Boyhood) the best movie I’ve seen this year.

The title character is a novice nun who has been raised in a convent orphanage. Just before she is to take her vows in the early 1960s, she is told for the first time that she has an aunt. She meets the aunt, and Ida learns that she is the survivor of a Jewish family killed in the Holocaust. The aunt takes the novice on an odd couple road trip to trace the fate of their family.

The chain-smoking aunt (Agata Kulesza) is a judge who consumes vast quantities of vodka to self-medicate her own searing memories. But the most profound difference isn’t that the aunt is a hard ass and that the nun is prim and devout. The most important contrast is between their comparative worldliness – the aunt has been around the block and the novice is utterly naive and inexperienced (both literally and figuratively virginal). The young woman must make the choice between a future that follows her upbringing or one which her biological heritage opens to her. As Ida unfolds, her family legacy makes her choice an informed one.

The novice Ida, played by newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska, is very quiet – but hardly fragile. Saying little, she takes in the world with a penetrating gaze and a just-under-the-surface magnetic strength.

Superbly photographed in black and white, each shot is exquisitely composed. Watching shot after shot in Ida is like walking through a museum gazing at masterpiece paintings one after the other. Ida was directed and co-written by Pawel Pawlikowski, who also recently directed the British coming of age story My Summer of Love (with Emily Blunt) and the French thriller The Woman in the Fifth (with Kristin Scott Thomas and Ethan Hawke). He is an effective and economic story-teller, packing textured characters and a compelling story into an 80 minute film.

Ida is also successful in avoiding grimness. Pawlikowski has crafted a story which addresses the pain of the characters without being painful to watch. There’s some pretty fun music from a touring pop/jazz combo and plenty of wicked sarcasm from the aunt.

Ida won the International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Ida was my pick as the best film at Cinequest, where it won the Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature.

Ida is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

Ida: best movie of the year so far

IdaOpening more widely tomorrow, the Polish drama Ida, which I saw at this year’s Cinequest, is the best movie I’ve seen this year.

The title character is a novice nun who has been raised in a convent orphanage. Just before she is to take her vows in the early 1960s, she is told for the first time that she has an aunt. She meets the aunt, and Ida learns that she is the survivor of a Jewish family killed in the Holocaust. The aunt takes the novice on an odd couple road trip to trace the fate of their family.

The chain-smoking aunt (Agata Kulesza) is a judge who consumes vast quantities of vodka to self-medicate her own searing memories. But the most profound difference isn’t that the aunt is a hard ass and that the nun is prim and devout. The most important contrast is between their comparative worldliness – the aunt has been around the block and the novice is utterly naive and inexperienced (both literally and figuratively virginal).  The young woman must make the choice between a future that follows her upbringing or one which her biological heritage opens to her.  As Ida unfolds, her family legacy makes her choice an informed one.

The novice Ida, played by newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska, is very quiet – but hardly fragile. Saying little, she takes in the world with a penetrating gaze and a just-under-the-surface magnetic strength.

Superbly photographed in black and white, each shot is exquisitely composed. Watching shot after shot in Ida is like walking through a museum gazing at masterpiece paintings one after the other.  Ida was directed and co-written by Pawel Pawlikowski, who also recently directed the British coming of age story My Summer of Love (with Emily Blunt) and the French thriller The Woman in the Fifth (with Kristin Scott Thomas and Ethan Hawke).  He is an effective and economic story-teller, packing textured characters and a compelling story into an 80 minute film.

Ida is also successful in avoiding grimness. Pawlikowski has crafted a story which addresses the pain of the characters without being painful to watch. There’s some pretty fun music from a touring pop/jazz combo and plenty of wicked sarcasm from the aunt.

Ida won the International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.  Ida was my pick as the best film at Cinequest, where it won the Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature.