Unfamiliar
with Martin Amis's novel, a single viewing of The
Zone of Interest
clarified neither the “zone” nor the “interest”, if not
simply the German Third Reich’s wartime death factories at Oświęcim
in western Poland, or the domestic circumstances of
Auschwitz-Birkenau camp commandant Rudolf Höss
(Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) who lived
next door. We
consider this tale through the lens of the U.S. management class as
it appears for instance in the AMC series Mad
Men
(2007-2015),
imagining
a
senior executive preparing a performance evaluation. Höss, an
energetic young executive, runs his firm’s premier operation
abroad where he, his homemaker wife Hedwig, and their growing family
enjoy full company perquisites which include a furnished home and
domestic servants. Neither spouse is of the management class. Höss’s
zeal and attention to detail indicate advancement potential and he is
supported by his wife’s ambitions for him and their family. The
couple also displayed initiative using local resources to build a
showplace family home directly outside factory walls which throb with
efficiency around the clock, complete with a garden, swimming pool,
and greenhouse. When the company temporarily transfers Höss
closer to the home office to
evaluate his performance in a legacy operation, it approves his request to
keep his family at Auschwitz. He
is
promoted and returned to the premier operation to lead a major firm
initiative in his name.
Of
course, in stark contrast to U.S. advertising executives competing for accounts to
market cigarettes or home appliances, this German organization man is
tasked to reduce entire populations of human beings to enslavement or
ashes and stockpiles of reusable commodity goods.
A
poignant detail arises when Hüller's
Hedwig
finds lipstick in a fur coat stolen from an internee—one of her
husband’s perquisites. Trying on the lipstick in a private moment
before her bedroom mirror
she makes
an
intimate connection, a kind of kiss between lips that owned it
and
lips that stole it. A child plays knucklebones with former gold dental hardware. We
wondered also what dogs outside the camp, like the Höss family dog,
heard from dogs’ constant barking inside it.
The
Zone of Interest
2023 U.S./U.K./Poland (105 minutes) A24/Access Entertainment/Film4.
Direc.ted by Jonathan Glazer from his screen.play adaptation of Martin
Amis’s 2014 novel of this title; music by Mica Levi; ci.nematography
by Łukasz
Żal;
editing by Paul Watts; production desi.gn by Chris Oddy; costume
desig.n by Małgorzata
Karpiuk; produced by Ewa Puszczyńska
and James Wilson.
