Sign of fate: Jonathan Glazer’s new film, The Zone of Interest, which is making an impression in the Cannes competition, is bereaved by the sudden death of the British writer Martin Amis, 73, the author of the sulphurous book from which is drawn this chilling feature film. For the moment, the British filmmaker has not reacted to the death of his compatriot.
“In The Zone of Interest, I use satire when I describe the Nazis, it’s true, recalled the writer at Point. But the substance of the book is serious. I think that a writer who deals with the Holocaust bears a particular responsibility. In The Zone of Interest – an area designated by the Nazis as the part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp leased to the IG Farben company – Martin Amis tells a love story in the shadow of the crematory ovens, describes the asexual life of Hitler and Eva Braun and SS escapades filled with hatred.
Of the three characters in the novel, Jonathan Glazer has kept only the camp commander whose real name he gives: this is the SS Rudolf Höss, who will be executed in 1947. He makes a free adaptation of it, keeping in his stage the harsh, dry style of the writer.
You never see what’s going on behind the camp’s barbed-wire walls, except for the smoke billowing into the air. Off camera, we hear screams, cries, gunshots and the continuous roar of industrial death.
Meanwhile, the Höss children go to school, their mother plants rose bushes, and their soldier-like father irons out the details of the Final Solution, oversees plans for a new crematorium, keeps things in order. . Everything is banal, routine. It is the blurring of the boundaries between the human and the inhuman. A theme dear to the filmmaker of Under the Skin (2013), the story of an extraterrestrial transformed into a woman of great beauty.
