During the Cannes Film Festival, Konbini tells you about his favorites or looks back on the biggest events of the selection. See also on Konbini What is The Zone of Interest? The first film by Jonathan Glazer, rather unknown and yet excellent, Sexy Beast, announced a future great filmmaker – but one could not guess the radicalization of his cinema. His second, Birth, may well be one of Xavier Dolan’s favorite films, but he is already pushing his cinema a little further, with this little boy convinced to be the reincarnation of Nicole Kidman’s husband who died some time ago. . But it’s still much more academic than his third feature, downright more experimental for once: the much noticed Under the Skin. A pure and cold SF film where Scarlett Johansson hunts down men to seduce them, kill them and keep their skins – basically. There is in this film an unbearable sequence, but where the horror is off-screen, and framed / filmed/directed with disconcerting coldness: a couple drowns, leaving their baby on the beach. The latter knocks out a man to take him away, and leaves, leaving the infant screaming in the background. We don’t see this young being who is obviously going to die alone on the beach – a horrible, chilling gesture. Everything is off-screen. So imagine a film entirely constructed, and based on this feeling. 1h45 of horrific unease, but this time, on the daily life of the small family of Rudolf Höss, commander of Auschwitz-Birkenau, who lives in a house attached to the death camp…Why is it good? We never seen a film like The Zone of Interest, in its radicalness, and in its subject. In 2023, many films have already tackled the horrors of the Holocaust. Jonathan Glazer decides to strike aside. By very falsely adapting the book of the same name by Martin Amis, the filmmaker recounts the horror of the sidelines. How the dehumanization of the Nazis blinds them to this point of what is literally happening before their eyes. There is first a scenario of great intelligence. Not characterizing its characters enough, so that we understand their life without ever getting attached to them, we nevertheless see the daily hassles of a “classic” German family. We cook, we read stories to children in bed, we do gardening. The only difference is that when you have this position and this rank in the hierarchy, you are more than comfortable. We have house staff, we have prisoners from the camps who come to do menial tasks. We have a small swimming pool with a slide, rustic certainly but we are not to complain. And yet we complain: there are too many officers who come to pick lilacs. To name just one. And in the middle of this false banality, hides the horror. The gold tooth horror that a kid is playing with. The horror of the smoke from the chimneys of the camp ovens which makes the mother-in-law who has come to relax cough. Of a lipstick found in a coat of a deportee. And banality is also the daily life of this commander, who is stuck in a bureaucratic enterprise. Because one of the great aspects of the film: to show the industrialization, and the administration behind one of the most serious genocides of our time. Whether it’s through terrible meetings where we talk about optimizing cremations, or discussions with the hierarchy to talk about mutations. But put it like that, it seems classic. Terrible on the bottom, but classic. Except that the form is even more experimental than anything Glazer has done so far. Did you find Under The Skin difficult to access? You are not ready for this new film.Almost entirely made up of fixed, long shots, where the slowness of the action is deliberately close to our daily lives, with work on the photo and the grain as close as possible to reality (we never seen colors so true, not dull but which perfectly transcribe the rendering of the human eye in fact). And with a symmetry, a work on the frame, which encloses these employees of horror. And that’s not to mention the background noise, made up of screams, barking, gunshots, and above all, the incessant, unbearable, unbearable noise of the ovens. We thought that with this hermetic and not easy to approach form, this extremely disturbing background, and this terrible conclusion, critical feedback was going to be complicated. However, not only is the film unanimously approved by the spectators who took the shock in the face, but the room was, surprisingly, not emptied during the session. The first big splash of this festival, which allows the first to come out: “I don’t see how he couldn’t have the Palme“. And we agree. What do we remember? The actress who does well: Sandra Hüller, incredible (as usual) The main quality: her narration, her subject and her form The main flaw: too experimental in certain sequences that take us out of the storyA film that you will like if you liked: Under the Skin and the short film The Fall by Jonathan Glazer, the cinema of Roy AnderssonIt could have been called: My life as a NaziThe quote to sum up the film : “Radical in its approach, The Zone of Interest is a slap from which we will have a hard time recovering”
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