During the 1990s, a cohort of directors emerged to team up with some of the more ambitious indie bands and brands to produce a wave of ground-breaking music videos and ads.
Spike Jonze, David Fincher, Mark Romanek, Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham made music videos for, respectively, the Beastie Boys (Sabotage), George Michael (Freedom), Fiona Apple (Criminal), Daft Punk (Around the World) and the Aphex Twin (Come to Daddy).
Many of whom, you’ll have noticed, went on to make the move into features. But, with the exception of Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, and Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind (all three of which were written by Charlie Kaufman), their films proved to be every bit as conventional and studio-bound as the wave of from-advertising-to-feature film makers who’d preceded them, with the likes of Ridley and Tony Scott, Adrian Lyne and Alan Parker.
And when Jonathon Glazer, the classiest member of that former cohort, made that same transition, it seemed that he too was destined to similarly disappoint.
Glazer had made the iconic videos for Radiohead’s Street Spirit and Karma Police, and Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity, as well as Guinness’ surfing-horses and Sony Bravia’s exploding-paint-in-a-Glasgow-housing-estate ads.
But his initial foray into features was decidedly underwhelming. Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004) and Under The Skin (2013, and reviewed by me earlier here) were thin and narratively under-cooked. So it was with something of a heavy heart that I sat down to watch his fourth feature, The Zone of Interest (2023).
How refreshing to be proved so unequivocally wrong. The Zone of Interest is both a serious film and one of genuine substance.
It doesn’t seem to have much of a story, and you’d be forgiven for thinking there’d been little writing involved in the crafting of the script. But the superior writing comes in what Glazer leaves out from the source material of Martin Amis’ 2014 novel. As ever then, the writing is in the editing.
It is the fact that nothing remarkable happens, as the German family go about their daily business somewhere in Poland, in 1943, that makes it impossible for us not to notice that they are living literally next door, not just to a, but to the most notorious concentration camp ever constructed. That then, devastatingly, is the story.
How on earth can that be? How can human beings possibly live right next door to that, and not be consumed by it? As such, it becomes a searing indictment of the Germans, the east Europeans, and of the whole of the West. After all, everyone there knew what was going on, but almost no one did anything about it.
In his New Yorker review , Anthony Lane wondered whether an entire feature film was the best way to explore what was being avoided. After all, hadn’t Alain Resnais done that so much more economically in Night and Fog, his 32 minute documentary film from 1956?
But it is precisely because we already have Claude Lanzmann’s monumental 9 hour Shoah (reviewed by me earlier here) and Resnais’s Night and Fog, both of which address the holocaust head on, that a film which refuses to do so becomes so potent.
By not to facing up to what ought to be unavoidable, the film forces us to address those unanswerable questions. And, irrespective of how unsatisfactory any answers might be, it’s vital nonetheless that those questions are asked.
You can see the trailer for The Zone of Interest here:
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