the experimentalist
 

Posted on 14.10.2023

Winner of the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, The Zone of Interest is a staggering look at the Holocaust, confirming the importance and singularity of this English filmmaker.

“A non-prolific director” would be an understatement: he has released only four features in twenty-three years. Each time, after a long development process (Under the Skin took him a decade...), a non-typical film emerges that eschews narrative conventions and linear storytelling in favour of a singular atmosphere and the creation of a unique experience for the viewer. The paradox is that this discreet, even indecipherable filmmaker, born in London in 1965, got his start through purely commercial activities, advertising and many music videos, experimenting despite the limitations. He has thus filmed Nick Cave in sumptuous black and white (Into My Arms in 1997) or Jack White ("a real actor, he reminds me of Orson Welles", says the filmmaker), who confronts his fellow Dead Weather bandmate, Alison Mosshart, in a disturbing machine-gun duel (Treat Me Like Your Mother, 2009).

Photo by LOIC VENANCE / AFP

After Sexy Beast (2000) and Birth (2004), Jonathan Glazer directed the disconcerting Under The Skin (2014), which follows Scarlett Johansson through the streets of Edinburgh, a young woman as poisonous as she is obsessive, an alien predator without affectation devoted to luring young men into her net, a viscous black magma lost in space-time, fascinated by her voluptuous, icy beauty. While the strange protagonist experiences her first emotions, the filmmaker explores the relationship between body and soul.

This time, the filmmaker seems to be asking himself: Where does our humanity stand in the face of the unfathomable? The Zone of Interest is a very loose adaptation of Martin Amis's novel of the same name, published in 2014. But like the œuvre by Michael Faber from which Under The Skin is adapted, the book offers the filmmaker a pretext for shifting the point of view. Glazer gives his own vision of the death camps; his off-screen presence is only revealed to the viewer through the astonishing sound work. The Zone of Interest follows the daily life of a wealthy German family whose house borders the Auschwitz concentration camp. While the camp commandant and his wife are happy with their glittering lifestyle built from the fortunes of Holocaust victims, millions of European Jews perish on their doorstep.

The director explains that he was struck by archival footage from World War II showing neighbours in the death camps "enjoying watching the spectacle"… "I began to wonder how it was possible to stand there and do nothing", the filmmaker said emphatically, seeking to come to grips with the truth of the Holocaust.