As Affluence Lives Next Door to Death, What are we Doing Here?
DIRECTED BY JONATHAN GLAZER/2023
In 2007, there was an announcement that Ron Howard was planning to direct a remake to Michael Haneke’s masterpiece Cache. I remember this feeling less like an announcement and more like a ransom note and all I could think was please give Ron Howard anything he wants to make sure this doesn’t happen.
Usually, we don’t negotiate with terrorism in this country, but we were able to successfully bury that project. And at that time, I remember thinking that there is no way to recreate Haneke. You just can’t. Too much of what he does is intangible. Nailing down what makes him great is a whole semester worth of debates, and it’s impossible trying to recreate it.
Fast forward to today and Jonathan Glazer’s new film, The Zone of Interest (which stars Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller), premieres. When I first heard the premise, and the view of WW2 explained from the banality of humanity on the periphery- in this case, the family of a high-ranking Nazi commandant literally living next door to the Auschwitz death camp- I thought that sounds a lot like what Haneke did in The White Ribbon. But surely, there must be something different going on here.
Until I started watching, and witnessed long, wide-framed, deep-focused, very Haneke-ish cinematography to accompany what sounded very thematically similar. Yet I look online and see people calling The Zone of Interest a revelation and unlike any film they’ve seen before.
For some reason, I couldn’t get past the one-note gimmick and wondered why while watching – how do I think what some directors bring to the table, aforementioned Haneke included, feels so revolutionary, yet this just feels like a barely expanded basic premise.
The problem is the thought that is being provoked is very linear and seems to be more lecturing of human nature, yet I don’t know if it fully captures who we are today. There’s a banality of indifference on display, yet our modern-day indifferences, to either the rise of fascism or the destruction of the planet, seems so specifically annoying. And is mostly fueled by a social media age. One side is just straight rallying around the fascism, in their anger-fueled bubbles, and the other side is so addicted to stupid videos, avoiding negativity and the idea that mental health is like a Jenga tower and any minor disruption will cause it to all spill, I felt the overall commentary in The Zone of Interest was ultimately too broad.
It almost plays out in an almost sitcom-like premise in the end, and with distracting sound design of screams and terror that reminded me of a play where horse trotting is heard through a side speaker. Even if you get invigorated by what this film is giving you at first, and excited to ride it to where it may go, by the time the film is about being transferred and who in the chain of command they can talk to about this, I was just wondering to myself, “what are we doing here?’
I’ll give Glazer credit for approaching film in a more interesting way, and taking on this ambitious endeavor, and the final five minutes feels like the film is finally moving to step two of an interesting commentary, but ultimately it just doesn’t work and further leaves me with an admiration for what great artists (Haneke) are able to make look so easy.