Saw this shit Tuesday morning.

Considering the week the Middle East has had, it is chilling to watch something like this.

Very experimental. Very evil by design.

It's really something to show the mundane day to day life of a loving Nazi family while at parts of the film you can hear gunshots in the distance as well as faint screams. The Nazi family lives next door to Auschwitz.

Seriouly they live in the nice house with a pool, garden and a staffed house and over the garden wall atrocities are being commited to no care of the family. Whenever you hear screams or gunshots the family doesn't flich or aknowdleges it. Even the smokestack with ashes constantly flowing out is nothing to them.

Again, this is very experimental and slow to show the mundane life of evil people. A haunting film.

Too restrained/dull for its own good imo, perhaps a bit pretentious. Were there horrifying/haunting/memorable moments or images? Yes, but I dunno if it justifies the movie as a whole.

As it was, I thought it would work better as a short film. A mundane day in the life of this Nazi family that has horrifying sounds in the background, leading up to that meeting where he approves the rotating crematorium. After that point, I was sorta waiting for it to hit another gear with a third act that truly deals with the horrors being inflicted on the other side of the wall. The ending was an interesting choice, but didn’t exactly land for me.

Or if the home was preserved, it would make an excellent museum tour.

But I have to admit I found it to be a boring movie.


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"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

Glazer is hit or miss with me, but there was something here that was so chilling and engrossing

a huge part was the cinematography -- every shot seemed meticulously framed with just the right amount of light and color (not familiar with Lukasz Zal's work before this, but damn)

what was the point? well I think we've all seen enough movies that have covered the Holocaust from every angle, but this one had me stare into the abyss of evil from the most mundane perspective imaginable -- which made it all the more haunting

These people have a nice place to live. For the most part, they're pretty...cordial, at least, with the people around them. And they're just doing some basic homemaker activities, dancing around getting too specific about work, raising kids, enjoying the fruits of their labor.


But that fucking SOUND in the background, the entire time. So inescapable and dreadful, it never lets you forget where this dumb little story is taking place. To the point once the husband is sent off to discuss the, uh, new logistics they'll be implementing thanks to the (I think maybe not even alluded to) advances of USA and Russia, I felt that sick empathy Glazer was trying to get at in interviews I read afterward.


NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT in the sense...I think it's easy to conflate empathy with sympathy, so let me be clear I didn't feel sorry for him at all. I was even more disgusted. Removed from the idyllic home he'd built, forced to describe the work he was doing in such clinical language in such a sterile setting, I think he realized how evil he was at the same time the movie wanted to hammer home that most awful officers of the state, particularly of that era, don't recognize who they are until it's too late.


I was reminded of one of the more, I don't know if controversial is the right word but definitely divisive scenes near the end of Band of Brothers, when the Nazi general is given a moment to address his troops and delivers a speech at least as rousing as any other in the series. Zone of Interest is a story about people who believed in their own supremacy and idea of absolution that they could be rendered domicile by nothing more than a walled garden.


I'll probably never watch this thing again, and ultimately I don't think it fully makes the arguments it wants to without a little nudge from the viewer. But reclining on a couch with a couple of beers and a 4K TV hooked into a decent speaker system...I was definitely on the edge of sobbing constantly. It emphasizes how comprehensively finding comfort in your own life can erect a wall between you and the rest of us.


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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

>ultimately I
>don't think it fully makes the arguments it wants to without a
>little nudge from the viewer.

This fascinated me because I was following your thoughtful review with fascination and initially read this part as praise because that's how I would have meant that same sentiment. But it looks like it's a (slight and careful, but still) knock on the film. So can you tell us a little bit more about how you sense this? Not argumentative, just really curious.

I had just been reading some reviews like Manohla Dargis' in the NYT and some similar sentiments on Letterboxd that the movie feels a little "hollow". Which seems to be entirely the point, and an excellent example of movie as metaphor. But it got me to thinking about the final scenes.


Specifically, in the final moments the dry heaving coupled with the flash forwards to the museum point to a sort of sterilization of ugliness/evil, which again is the point of the movie. Thematically, it's incredibly strong.


But combined with some of the vague, vignette-like nature of the rest of the movie - did it ever make clear whether the kid being bullied was a younger brother or a house slave; why did Junior Hitler want to gas his own kind - the feeling of disassociation gets punctured a bit.


So when I saw several smart people rejecting the idea that Zone of Interest completely explains itself, I understood/stand. Then I considered how much of it is really just slice of life mundanity - again, THE POINT - that makes for a pretty dull portrayal of an incurably dark scenario.


I love bleak movies - Beau Is Afraid and Synecdoche New York are two of my favorites of the past 20 years, Virginia Woolf one of my favorite classics - but thinking about this reminded of a canonical film I've always hated, Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. For me, it's similarly dull and hopeless - or as Dargis said about this one, art for art's sake.


With so much time removed, and so many war epics behind us, I was deeply moved by the reminder that much of this genocide was built on the promise of upper middle class quality of life for the chosen people who weren't Chosen People. But that's what you as a viewer have to bring to this movie, because the characters are too self-absorbed to even hint at the dichotomy of their situation.


I'm a massive sucker for sound design, and the immediately famous quote from the lead sound editor about this movie is, paraphrasing, "there's the movie you see on the screen and the movie you hear in the background, which is arguably the real movie." If that doesn't work, well...there's certainly a lot more drama in the background than the foreground, and I can understand why people might confuse austerity for obfuscation.



~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

I don't know why I asked before I'd seen it. It's up this weekend so hopefully I'll have something interesting to say that moves this forward but it's possibly I'll just nod sagely and whisper "yes"

I'm up and down, in and out on Kara Swisher as a whole...but I do love Glazer, and her recent appearance on Swisher's podcast was terrific.


Specifically regarding the response to Jonathan Glazer's awards remarks, she highlights what I was kind of pointing at but too dumb to articulate.


Zone of Interest shows how people who aren't experiencing a holocaust, or a "simple" genocide, normalize it not exactly as something others DESERVE, but clearly as something I/ME/US/WE/OURSELVES aren't enduring...so it can just kind of linger, being. Still in the context of this movie, and the response to it, she's repulsed by what she sees as a disingenuous appeal to emotion, that Jewish suffering in the 1500s, 1900s and within/beyond excuses arguably equal but undeniably more deadly retribution.


As dumb as Broad City could be, she never struck me as a total goof. But how she talked about the industry response to this movie - and her own feelings about it - during this Swisher interview really emboldened my feeling that Zone of Interest is such a fascinatingly passive movie. It demands knowing about it's context beforehand, but allows for abstraction.


You can see American plantations, internment camps, reservations or border silos in it. Or how China and India have been forced to relinquish territories they've then been allowed to blockade, pillage and torment as they see fit anyway. The way influences of English, French, Italian and the States' eventual economic inheritance of said colonial efforts have locked all of Africa in perpetual civil war.


Which, of course, isn't new to the average OKP especially at this point in the game...but what she pointed to so powerfully in that interview (again, in tangentially discussing the film) is that her people famously suffered while exponentially more people shrugged. "Her people" are doing it now in defense of an absolute genocide, "our people" did it in defense of a carpet retribution and "those people" are going buckwild all over the world...but that's just news, it's not HERE. It's back then, not now, it's them, not us.



...I stand by the flaws I think Zone of Interest has as a movie, probably or perhaps exactly because I'm just a guy with a flawless internet connection rambling on a dead film forum...but clearly I generally think that Ilana Glazer interview is well worth a listen. And the points she made about the response to the response to this movie have me thinking the flaws might not matter at all, because the message is truly quiet as a bomb.



~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

But I would say, I think someone could easily take issue with the film if the intent was show that on some level Rudolf Höss knew what he was doing was evil UNLESS their is some historical record that shows he actually expressed some remorse.

I don't know enough to weigh in but if I compared it to American Slavery I could say not nearly enough people who participated in American Slavery recognized on any level what they were doing was wrong. It was just how they thought the world goes.



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"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"