A beautiful sunny day, a neat garden, a clean and comfortable house, children playing on the balcony, women talking over a cup of tea, men talking about work isolated in a room . Everything seemed perfect if not for the fact that hell was raging just a few meters away. Jonathan Glazer ten years after it was sensational Under the Skinexperimental science fiction film with a wonderful Scarlett Johanssonback to the cinema with the The Area of Interest (The Zone of Interest), adapted one of the most beautiful and touching novels of Martin Amis. As for the Under the Skin by Faber – author of The White Petal and the Crimson – Glazer decided to almost completely distance himself from the original literary work by adapting the novel but keeping the same feelings of anxiety. The Area of Interest after his passage to the Cannes Film Festival he arrived at the Rome Film Festival accompanied by his director.
A man and his wife try to build a perfect life in a seemingly dreamlike place: days of boat trips, his office work, teas with his friends and bike rides with their children . But this man Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), commandant of Auschwitz, who was with his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) are committed to building the life they dreamed of for their family, in the small idyll of a house with a garden built right next to the camp wall…
The place may seem the most ordinary, a bourgeois family lives quietly in the countryside, away from the noise of the city with a series of problems that any family would face. If only they weren’t really the heroes of the story Rudolf Hössone of the longest serving commanders of the Auschwitz concentration camp – famous for introducing Zylkon B gas, with the aim of killing more people faster – and a host of SS men from the Nazi regime. And this is how the bright idyll turns into the most terrible nightmare, already announced by the terrible and hard sound, that blackness that invades the room as soon as the film begins and then glances at a quiet family picnic on the river bank on a warm spring day.
The area of interest is a suspended area, as perfect as it is terrible Jonathan Glazer he knows exactly how to represent it. After being restless in movies like birth together Nicole Kidman, Under the Skin and a series of shorts – where it stands out above all else The Fall – Glazer tackles one of the most horrific historical periods in human history in a completely new and detached way, placing the viewer in front of a moral dilemma. This is not the first time that the Holocaust has been told from the point of view of the oppressor, just think of Littel’s beautiful and terrible novel “The Benevolent” but it is the first time that the terror of Nazism has been staged in this way. .
Glazer decided not to show the atrocities but to hear them, and this is perhaps the most terrible way for the audience to participate. From beginning to end, although no acts of outright violence are shown, it is evident from the terrible sounds coming from outside the walls, including screams of terror, rifle shots, cries of children and the constant black smoke of the gas chambers in the distance, visible from every window of the house in the area of interest, like the constant noise of the train coming and going, and the column of smoke coming out of the locomotive . Glazer, with cool, set, symmetrical and precise direction, places the camera in strategic areas of the house and outside the property, creating a sense of balance and order where they are completely absent. . The only positive moment of the film is represented in black and white, in the negative, with night vision, depersonalizing and removing any spark of joy that moment might have conveyed. In the area of interest there are those who stayed for family, those who fled because of the bad smell of the gas chambers or to receive a promotion at work and those who lost their lives just a few meters from the idyll.
And the sound is definitely the strong point of The Area of Interest, mixing musical experimentalism with horrible sounds, the most horrible you’ll ever hear. The pornography of the disease is completely canceled, leaving the viewer to imagine the atrocities taking place on the other side of the fence, ending in one of the most nihilistic, cold, isolated endings in the history of recent cinema, a decline . towards the depths of total indifference.
The Area of Interest (The Zone of Interest) it’s a testament to Jonathan Glazer’s directing and storytelling abilities. Ten years after his last film, the director returns to adapt the powerful novel of the same name by Martin Amis in a film that narrates the Holocaust from a different perspective, placing the viewer in front of an ethical and social dilemma. With a sound sector capable of telling more than any picture. The Zone of Interest is a masterpiece of horror, a true horror, in broad daylight, leading to a descent into the total darkness of one of the worst times in human history.
La Zona d’Interesse arrives in Italian cinemas on January 18, 2024 distributed by I Wonder Pictures. The official trailer of the movie is below:
Source: Red Capes
Ray Ortiz is a journalist at Gossipify, known for his coverage of trending news and current events. He is committed to providing readers with accurate and unbiased reporting, and is respected for his ability to keep readers informed on the latest news and issues.
