It was one of the shocks of the Cannes Film Festival. The Area of Interest by Jonathan Glazer saw the Palme d’Or pass under his nose in favor ofAnatomy of a fall, but this powerful work, rewarded with the Grand Prize from the jury chaired by Ruben Östlund, is no less striking. The director ofUnder The Skin plunges the viewer into the heart of the banality of Evil by making them share the almost ordinary daily life of Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz and his perfect little family. “I wanted to capture the contrast between someone pouring a cup of coffee in their kitchen and someone being murdered on the other side of the wall, the coexistence of these two extremes,” explains the filmmaker.
The camp is very close to their idyllic suburban house, only separated from their garden by a common wall. Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller (which is definitely the year after Anatomy of a fall) embody this terrible couple in their banality. To adapt Martin Amis’ novel, Jonathan Glazer made a daring choice: he never shows what happens in the concentration camp but lets it be imagined through remarkable work on the soundtrack which diffuses an almost deadly atmosphere. bearable. The film’s music by Mica Levi is pure marvel.
Show or guess?
Nothing will ever be stronger than the unbearable images that reveal Holocaust by Claude Lanzmann currently rebroadcast on France 2 or Night and Fog by Alain Resnais which confront the viewer head-on with reality. Jonathan Glazer’s approach allows us to imagine off-camera what is happening around a small, civilized world. Screams, gunshots, flying ash and passing trains punctuate the lives of characters whose indifference to the horror makes the blood run cold.
The father, a zealous linchpin of the “final solution”, is affectionate with his family and reveals more passion for his garden than for the human beings he murders while trying to be as “efficient” as possible. His wife cares more about his bourgeois comfort than what might be happening on the other side of the wall. She under no circumstances wants to leave what she considers to be a heavenly place when it comes to transferring her husband to another camp. And what about the sharing of the deportees’ property between the different members of the community of executioners? The gap between their cozy world and the neighboring terror is so appalling that it is as repugnant as a direct representation while remaining visually modest.
A duty of memory and prevention
Jonathan Glazer suffocates the viewer whom he invites to reflect on the notion of inhumanity. If the message is sometimes highlighted – especially at the end of the film – and the whole thing appears somewhat poseur with a device that would be more at home in a contemporary art museum, there is no doubt that The Area of Interest is an important film. It recalls the unspeakable and can help us track down the filthy beast, which is often tempted to rear its ugly head again.