Past Lives: THE ZONE OF INTEREST

Writer-director Jonathan Glazer’s project is taking sub-genres that have hardened into particular closed modes and pushing out the walls until we see them from fresh angles. From these unusual perspectives he keeps us somehow entranced and alienated at the same moment by the way the films, so simultaneously stiff and slippery, get away from the expected. There’s his gangster movie drilled down into intimate interior discomfort in Sexy Beast, the ghostly return of Birth refracted through haunted confusions and chilly melodrama, and the alien visitation of Under the Skin that pulses and squirms under haunted tactile exploration and bodily ambiguity. Now we have The Zone of Interest, a Holocaust movie kept entirely within the life of an Auschwitz commander and his family. We see the camp’s smokestacks, guard towers, and barbed wire just over the family’s brick fence that walls them off from the systematic murders with which they’re inextricably tied. Certainly we can load the outside edges of the frame with the weight of historical context on our own, but it’s the muffled hints of screams and shouts and gunshots on a near-constant distant background hum that really sell the horror we can’t see. He won’t let us forget. He makes the images deliberately still and ugly, the camera locked down in frames that are so transparently digital, photographed by Łukasz Żal with harsh lighting accentuating the hard-edged realism of the pixels. He makes us watch naturalistic domestic scenes, stuck with them as blood runs colder. Our only glimpse of life outside the family is shot in photonegative, fitting for a world turned upside-down.

The film frames the actors unflatteringly, with no sense of posing for a camera, in blocking that feels pseudo-documentarian. But it never once feels unplanned—the details of dust and teeth and water and snow and fog are so potent and poetically evocative of the unspoken. Glazer will occasionally let a black screen or quotidian detail linger—flowers blooming in the mud. This pushes against endurance, reminding us we’re trapped as witnesses in this historical nightmare. The spare, plunking, droning Mica Levi score further enhances that feeling of total envelopment in this ice-cold moment. Within, we see the daily struggles of family life—kids, parents, co-workers, bosses. A mother (Sandra Hüller) wants to build a nice place for her children, a garden, a birthday, a day at the lake. A father (Christian Friedel) hopes to get promoted. A sudden shift in bureaucracy threatens to transfer him away from his domestic comfort, and there the narrative logic of watching a movie might threaten to take over and cause you to root for him to figure this out and keep his family together. And yet the inescapable fact of what, exactly, his job details works to prevent that rooting interest. Such casual monstrosity, such normalized cruelty, such mechanical, technical terror, right next door: it’s all so routine. One day he dictates a letter to an architect, starting it with a tossed off “Heil Hitler, etcetera.” He speaks with his wife about their perfect family home. By night, the light of the crematorium illuminates his daughters’ bedroom. More than just an embodiment of what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, this becomes a film looking down the dark corridor of history and listening to the victims’ screams echoing across time and space.

Black and White: THE WHITE RIBBON

Michael Haneke is a master filmmaker. With The White Ribbon he exhibits total control over every aspect of filmmaking as he creates an experience that tightens its icy grip around the nerves of the audience. It’s mysterious, but not a mystery, not exactly, although unexplained events do happen. Take the opening, where a small town doctor, out for a ride on his horse, hits a long, thin wire secretly hung low to the ground on his property, causing a horrible accident. Who hung the wire? And why is it gone when townsfolk come to investigate?

The film takes place in a small German village in the years just before World War I. The story unfolds in a stark, cold black and white. This is no nostalgic or historical color scheme. It comes with whites that sear and blacks that haunt. But despite such sharp contrast, this is not a film with a clear cut moral universe. Nor is it a film out to find the perpetrator and hand out justice. As the film quietly, patiently unfolds, as more mysterious accidents befall members of the community, we begin to sense only that the town is not as peaceful and pastoral as an initial glance would otherwise show. There is a darkness to these people. Haneke is not just laying bare dark permutations of human nature; he’s stripping the past of all rose-colored notions. When you think of your ancestors, the ones from so far back you know only their names and hazy, wrinkled photographs, you don’t often stop to wonder what they were really like.

Narrating the story for us is the town’s shy, young school teacher (Christian Friedel). He calmly lays out the facts of everyday life in this village, letting us into his thought processes as he tries to ascertain the identity (or identities) of the perpetrator of such increasingly violent “accidents.” Because he tells the story, he is beyond suspicion. But even more than the mere fact of his narration, his innocence shines on his face, which seems to exude both youth and goodness. We slowly begin to discover how the town’s respected figures of authority – the doctor (Rainer Bock), the pastor (Burghart Klaussner), the Baron (Ulrich Tukur) – are not as righteous as they appear. But just because they are shown to be monstrous, barbaric people in their actions doesn’t make them responsible for the incidents that are terrorizing the village.

A child goes missing. A barn burns. A woman falls to her death. Are these random, isolated tragedies? Or is something much darker afoot? Much like the middle-class French family in Haneke’s great Caché (2005), who find their lives turned upside-down by the mere fact of knowing that someone is watching them when mysterious videotapes of their house begin to appear on their front step, the villagers are thrown into a quietly mounting fear. The teacher keeps his eyes on the children, a source of both innocence and malevolence. They walk through the village in packs, somberly and seriously. They know something is wrong, but how much do they know about why?

This is a punishing film, but also an absorbing, mesmerizing experience. It’s such a fully immersive experience that it almost feels like time travel. This village is rendered in amazing specificity and detail. Leaving the theater, I felt like I’d seen a great movie, true, but I also felt like I was returning from a trip to that village in that time. All manner of human pain is laid bare in The White Ribbon and Haneke makes sure that you don’t miss a single minute of it. It’s austere and disturbing, and yet it is balanced by both a sweet romance for the teacher and sense of encroaching tragedy. Some of these men will be drawn into World War I. These children will grow up to fight World War II. The evil that mankind is capable of producing will be given a far greater backdrop than this humble village. After all, what is terrorizing this village is nothing less than the darkest aspects of humanity. This is a film about how we treat each other, how we punish each other, and how we punish ourselves. This is a film for our time and all time.