BEFORE: We're about to head into Awards Season, and these first two films of Movie Year 17 prove that with the right Oscar campaign, the right film can be promoted toward a Best Picture nomination, and without the right promotion, well, probably not. While I've programmed a few films that were in contention last year, what about this year, is there anything current I should be watching? Without going to the movie theater, that is. One web site says there are really only 12 films in contention, and the top six are "Anora", "The Brutalist", "Emilia Perez", "Wicked", "Conclave" and "Dune: Part Two". After that come films like "The Substance", "A Real Pain" and "A Complete Unknown". Well, I've got the "Dune" sequel programmed and taking up space on my DVR, so I guess I'll start there, that could cover me on some of the technical awards. But I'm not rushing out to see "Wicked", I'll see it when it streams, like I did for "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer". I've still got to watch "Killers of the Flower Moon" and last year's animated feature contenders like "Inside Out 2" and "Despicable Me 4".
Sandra Hüller carries over from "Anatomy of a Fall". Two days into the New Year, and I'm already on Nazis. Is that some kind of a sign?
THE PLOT: Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden beside the camp.
AFTER: This turns out to be a very dangerous film, because the intent from the start is to de-mystify the Nazis, it's based on a book by Martin Amis that dug deep into the lives of the family of Rudolf Höss, to prove that the perpetrators of the Holocaust weren't "mythologically evil", which sounds a bit too close to proving that they were humans. It seems that Rudolf and his family lived very close to the concentration camp that he supervised, but they had a nice little set-up on the other side of the wall. His wife set up a garden and greenhouse there, they had an in-ground pool with a slide and they often went on picnics or went swimming in a nearby lake or boating down a small river. And like the family seen in yesterday's film, they liked to listen to 50 Cent's "P.I.M.P." very loudly and on repeat. JK.
Sure, for the family this was probably a great set-up, they could swim and have fun all day, and if they needed new clothes or a new pair of shoes there was always something available in their size that nobody seemed to be using. Also there were plenty of loose teeth to examine, which would be fascinating for a young teen boy, I'm sure. And there were plenty of Polish servants to wait on them hand and foot, delivering them meals and drinks and shining their shoes several times a day, it sounds, great, right? Who would have thought there would be adults who would look back on those idyllic childhood years spent living next to the Auschwitz camp and think, "Man, those were great times." Yet that's where we find ourselves today.
Hedwig (aka Mrs. Nazi Commander, aka "The Queen of Auschwitz") has a nice little set-up going, she spent months getting her garden into shape, organizing the vegetables (alphabetically, no doubt) or making sure the line of sunflowers doesn't block the sun from getting to the cabbage plants. She has her friends come over to visit and she points out that they've installed central heating in the house, and I can't decide if this is meant to be funny or ironic or just bad taste, bragging about the heating systems at Auschwitz. Then her mother comes to visit and Hedwig can't wait to show her how well things are going with Rudolf's job.
So when her husband gets transferred to go supervise ALL the concentration camps from the central office in Berlin and a new commander is expected to take over Auschwitz, it's the end of her world, they just spent all that time setting up the family at this house, there are enough bedrooms for their five children (to share, but still), they've got a nanny, and terrified servants galore, and so many coats to have repaired and sterilized before she can wear them!
So sorry, Nazis, for the inconvenience of having to move around every few years, but that's the chance you take when you work for the military, especially in a dictatorship. If Hitler says he wants you to go take over another concentration camp in Hungary that isn't making their labor quotas, then that's what you have to do. Rudolf tries pulling some strings and having some of his contacts send in letters of support to keep him at the Auschwitz post, but nothing seems to work. Hedwig tries sending flowers from her garden to some of the top officials, to try to see if she can keep the family in this beautiful house conveniently located right next to the concentration camp while her husband is away on this new assignment. It's literally the first time in history that anybody has expended any energy at all to be so close to an internment death camp.
Look, I get it, nobody ever wants to pack up and move AGAIN, and who knows, maybe there were good schools near Auschwitz, I don't know. History is rather silent on this issue. But she's got a point, Rudolf is the one with the job, so why can't he commute? The kids shouldn't have to make all new friends every two years just because Dad's doing well working his way up the chain with fascism. And the new assignment might be temporary, anyway, Germany's going to have this war all wrapped up in the next few months, probably, and then they can finally find that farm they always wanted, somewhere out in the German countryside, away from all the hustle and bustle and sex clubs of Berlin. Bavaria is probably lovely in the spring, not to mention Oktoberfest, there's that to look forward to if Daddy's just willing to spend a little time away from his family and finish killing all the Jews, gypsies, gay people, cripples, immigrants and other undesirables.
I'll admit this is a new take on Nazis, and a perhaps interesting point of view - but again it's too close to suggesting that they had normal lives, but what they did overall was nothing close to normal, and suggesting that they just carried on like nothing was wrong while people were being burned in furnaces a few hundred feet away is beyond belief. Rudolf reads his daughters a bedtime story, but unfortunately, it's "Hansel and Gretel". You know, the story where the evil ugly (probably gypsy) witch ends up burned alive in her own oven? Yeah, if you look back on the old German fairy tales it would probably explain a lot about what led to the Nazis. Still, that's no excuse.
There are signs, however, that this life is anything but normal. At night a Polish girl sneaks out of her house and hides food at the work sites of the camp laborers. (This was shot in night-vision style and then enhanced with effects, so it was difficult for me to tell what was going on.). Rudolf takes his kids on a boating trip down the river, and while he's fishing, he sees some form of human remains float by. So he's got to pack up the kids immediately and get them home so they can be scrubbed down by servants and thoroughly sterilized. Hedwig's mother leaves without warning because (we assume) she can't stand the smell from the crematorium. She leaves a note, but we don't get to read what it says, I guess it can't be good because Hedwig takes out her frustration on her servants. Of course. These Nazis may be humans, but never forget they were terrible humans.
Still, I'm not sure this film deserved an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Was it just because of the Holocaust subject matter? Academy members may be conditioned to vote for any film that details the horrors of what the Nazis did, but is a nomination warranted in every single case? Or was "Schindler's List" such a great film that all these years later, films on this topic are still being considered for Best Picture as a result?
There were also language problems here - but not German to English, of course there were subtitles. I'm talking about the language of film, the cinematic grammar that's developed over the years, which we all kind of understand without thinking too much about it. Like the rule about not crossing the axis, which means that when you see two people talking together, you imagine an invisible line between them, and for the purposes of editing, you need to keep the camera on only one side of this line, because cuttiing to the reverse shot could make the two people appear to switch places. Whoever edited "The Zone of Interest" is either unaware of these little rules or for some reason took delight in not following them. There's also excessive, obsessive multi-camera coverage whenever someone walks down stairs - here there's a shot of the person approaching the stairs and walking down the first few steps, then a cut to the reverse shot from the landing below, which confirms that this person then walked down the remaining steps of that flight. Once they start going down the next flight of stairs, at a precise moment they cut to the next reverse shot, so we see them on every step from the next lower landing, and so on. But we all know how stairs work, you can actually cut a few stair steps out of the process and our brains will fill in the gap. Not according to obsessive German film editors, I guess.
It gets worse inside the house - if someone goes from the outside to the sitting room, first we need to see them entering the house from the outside garden, then the film cuts to the interior shot of them entering the foyer through that same door, then walk down the hall to the kitchen, and at a precise moment they cut to the interior shot from the kitchen so we can confirm that they did, in fact, use THAT doorway. We see them walk through the kitchen and start to enter the dining room, another cut to the interior dining room to see them walking through that door from the other side. God, how many rooms are there in this house? Can the next room please be the sitting room so we can stop this never-ending process of cutting to the next camera angle? Every night when Rudolf goes through the house and turns off all of the lights, there are hallways and doors and closets and it's an exacting, deliberate process, maybe we really get a feel here for how OCD all the Germans are.
But, according to the language of film, there are things I just don't understand here - especially in the beginning and the end. In the middle the editors got REALLY sneaky, because you never see the direct effects of the Holocaust, like you don't see a line of Jews being marched into a building and not coming out the other side. Instead there's a train JUST over that tree-line, and from time to time you hear the noise of the train, or you see the line of smoke that the train puts out - but if you think about it you know what the train is bringing to the camp. Then there's a gunshot in the distance every once in a while, and your mind is left to fill in the details about who might be shooting who. Then at night there's a bright light coming from the furnaces, and the loud sound of burning fire - but we know there's a wall between the Höss family home and the camp, so is this meant to be symbolic or what? Why would they design the set-up of the camp so the crematorium was adjacent to their house? Well, they wouldn't so perhaps this is artistic license, however any messing around with reality kind of impedes on the story, doesn't it?
Worse by far are two things I can't explain - at the start of the film there's five full minutes of black, no image, just discordant noise, and it's enough to make you think that your TV is malfunctioning, or there's a problem with your cable service. How many people will watch this film and call up the cable company to tell them they're not getting picture, and there's also something wrong with the audio? There's absolutely no reason to do this - if I saw this in a theater I would contact the management to tell them there's something wrong with the projector, or maybe the projectionist fell asleep. Then near the end of the film, there's a notable moment where Höss is going down the stairs in his obsessive German way by making sure he touches every step, and he stops on one landing and feels sick, maybe even throws up a bit. There's a sudden flash-forward to the Auschwitz Museum in the future, where we see the pile of shoes from the Holocaust victims on display, another exhibit just of crutches and medical equipment, all as the staff is cleaning the glass before the museum opens for the day. This would have been a great way to end the film, to cut suddenly into the present so we see that over time, the Nazis were not regarded as the saviors of their Master Race, but instead people remember the victims with a museum.
But no, the film cuts back to Höss, after he's sick from walking down the stairs. Did he experience the flash-forward? Did he have some sudden realization or insight that the Holocaust would not be regarded in the future as a positive thing? Was that what made him sick? Well, it's impossible, he could not see 75 or 80 years into the future, and even if he did, his mindset was so into this plan to exterminate Jews into society that's it's extremely doubtful that this insight would change him one bit. Although, he did mention that when he went to the reception with all the high-ranking Nazis, he did have an intrusive thought about how he would gas everyone in the room. But again, now we're humanizing the Nazis just a bit, and that's still a very dangerous thing to do, it's one step away from justifying their actions.
The director of this film got into some controversy when accepting the Oscar for Best International Feature, by speaking his thoughts on the war between Israel and Hamas. Umm, you know what, maybe stick to how bad Nazis are, because that's something everyone can agree on, even most modern Germans. I think if there's a take-away here, it's that even people who worked at the concentration camps had daily lives, and we do kind of tend to pigeon-hole them all. But they all had families, they went home from work and had dinner, maybe read a book to their kids, had sex with somebody who wasn't their wife and went to bed, then got up the next day and put in another shift at Auschwitz, like that wasn't even a thing. Any given day was a chance to speak up against the horrors of what was happening, but instead they just made it a part of their everyday lives. What's going to happen if Trump puts this giant immigration deportation plan into place? Something very similar - we'll have jobs galore for people willing to find all the illegal immigrants, transport them to some kind of holding area, maybe internment camps, and then there will be people hired to process them, feed them, give them medical care while they await deportation. And those will be just normal American people doing those jobs, and they'll go home to their families, have dinner, maybe read a book to their kids, have sex with somebody and get up the next day and put in another shift. Is that really what we want for our country?
Also starring Christian Friedel, Johann Karthaus, Luis Noah Witte, Nele Ahrensmeier, Lilli Falk, Anastazja Drobniak, Cecylia Pekala, Kalman Wilson, Medusa Knopf, Max Beck, Andrey Isaev, Stephanie Petrowitz, Martyna Poznanski, Zuzanna Kobiela, Benjamin Utzerath, Thomas Neumann, Klaudiusz Kaufmann, Marie Rosa Tietjen, Antje Falk, Julia Polaczek, Imogen Kogge, Wiktoria Wisniewska, Paulina Burzyk, Anna Marciniszyn, Agnieszka Wierny, Tomasz Piwko, Marnius Fislage, Ralph Herforth (last seen in "Speed Racer"), Daniel Holzberg, Rainer Haustein, Daniel Hoffman, Wolfgang Lampi, Oscar Lebeck, Christian Willy, Freya Kreutzkam, Sascha Maaz, Ralf Zillman and Slava (the dog).
RATING: 5 out of 10 Sturmbahnführers at the big meeting
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