Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall

Couched

Dear Friends,

I’m working my way through the Oscar movies. As usual here, these are more discussions than traditional reviews — and, really, are meant to be read after you’ve seen the film.

Best,

Sam

THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023)

dir. and written by Jonathan Glazer, based on a novel by Martin Amis, with Christian Friedel as Rudolf Höss

Pretty monotonous and heavy-handed. 

There are two genres that The Zone of Interest is sliding between. One is Holocaust Kitsch — Life Is Beautiful, Jojo Rabbit — in which the point is to make the Holocaust relatable and human and, in so doing, to (theoretically) defang Hitler. Mel Brooks is the godfather of this genre with his line, “If you ridicule [people like Hitler], laugh at them, they can’t win.” The other genre is Inside The Third Reich, in which we travel into the heart of darkness and see the Nazis as they saw themselves. Wannsee, Downfall, Valkyrie, etc, belong to that genre. 

I’m far more interested in Inside The Third Reich than I am in Holocaust Kitsch, but it’s an equally tricky genre to deal with. There’s always the question of when it’s too much, when you’re veering into something like retroactive complicity. And that does happen a bit in The Zone of Interest. There’s so much on the minutiae of Höss’ career, on the Höss’ marriage, that you do start getting invested in their domestic dramas, you do have to shake yourself and remember what Höss’ work actually entailed.

In the case of The Zone of Interest, the pressure of not falling too far into either genre boxes the film in, makes it close to lifeless. In the end, it’s like a negation of all the Holocaust movies that have come before. We’re not to see the camp — that’s too obvious. We keep our focus entirely on the picturesque lives of the Hösses — riding horses, picnicking in high grass. It feels like Holocaust Kitsch — the gambit of relatability in Holocaust kitsch — but then there’s all the drama in the soundtrack, the pistol shots and screams from the camp, as a blatant reminder of what the film is really about. And then, in terms of Inside The Third Reich, it probably is a fairly accurate depiction of the lifestyle and state of mind of the Hösses, and of other functionaries like them, but they’re so bland, ensconced so deep in Nazi kitsch, that they just become symbols — living, breathing banalities of evil — without the ability to in any way, over the course of the film, act. 

I was taken by The Zone of Interest as a sort of documentary of the Nazi killing apparatus. And I suspect that the film really gets a lot right — the outfits, the haircuts, the prim sanctimony of the Höss’ class — but there is also a constant need to remind us of their hypocrisy: to be sure that we know that every dress Frau Höss is trying on is taken off a gassed Jewish woman; that we do not forget the Höss’ venality. In the moral universe of The Zone of Interest, there is a pretty direct correlation between how fat your ass is (and how stupid your haircut) and how unreflectingly evil you are.

Trust no one with that haircut

Without much room to maneuver, the film drifts into something like parable. It’s very anti-office work and anti-gardening. It creates the idea — which Glazer hit home in his Oscar speech — that it’s not really about the Holocaust at all; that it’s an indictment of conventional, bourgeois life in general. All functionaries, the film seems to be saying, have a bit of the Hösses in them — anybody who’s a bit small-minded, a bit conformist, could easily find themselves tending to their gardens and paying no attention whatsoever to the pistol shots wafting in the wind from Auschwitz. 

It’s a powerful idea, of course, but I think it does kind of miss how fanatical, how sui generis, somebody like Höss likely was. I was a bit startled, after watching The Zone of Interest, to learn that Höss had written an autobiography shortly before his execution, in which he frankly discusses his Auschwitz work. From what I’ve read of the book, the banality of evil idea comes through — days before his death, Höss wrote to his son to say, “the biggest mistake of my life was that I believed everything faithfully which came from the top” — but there is also the overriding sense that Höss, like most of the leading Nazis, thought he was building something: something maybe outside good-and-evil but a different kind of civilization. In a comment in which he expressed regret for not having committed suicide during the fall of Germany, Höss said, “We were bound and fettered to that other world and we should have disappeared with it.” 

It’s that phrase ‘that other world’ that’s haunting — that speaks, I think, to who somebody like Höss really was and which doesn’t come through in the movie. Glazer’s Höss is a nihilistic bureaucrat — fantasizing about gassing even the other Nazis when he attends a meeting of camp commandants. The real Höss was a Freikorps member from 1918 and a Nazi from 1922, who voluntarily served a ten-year prison sentence for a murder carried out by his Freikorps brigade, who described his marriage as carried out “so that we might share the hardships of the life we had willingly chosen,” who, systematically, pushed past own scruples and feelings of pity during his Dachau posting in order to, as he put it, “exercise perpetual self-mastery and unbending severity,” and who describes himself, in the construction of Auschwitz, as “living only for [his] work.” Viewing him as a creature comfort-minded factotum misses much of the point: he was, as he put it, “a cog” in the system but he was also a true believer, an idealist in the peculiar Nazi mold, a self-made monster. 

ANATOMY OF A FALL (2023)

dir. Justine Triet, written by Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, with Sandra Hüller as Sandra

Like the platonic ideal of a Cannes movie: hyper-civilized, multilingual Europeans (even the blood spatter expert is très à la mode) and then, possibly, savage ferocious violence underneath all of it. The lawyers are witty and have cool long hair. The existential crises are, more than anything, about writer’s block. Even a scene of domestic violence is, for the most part, a deeply-analyzed depiction of the inside of a relationship, child care versus career, the tendency to portray oneself as a victim, that kind of thing. 

The question is where it all goes: if a serious romantic relationship eventually turns into one person murdering another (or badly wanting to) or if even the impulse towards violence is reflective of a deeper bond, of being ‘soulmates’; and then if a society like this, so composed, so evolved, is, in fact, all tending towards emasculation, frustration, and a towering rage emerging out of it. 

The central narrative of Anatomy of a Fall is figuring out what went wrong in Samuel’s life — or, as the defense lawyer Vincent puts it in an important peroration, “what was the final year like of Samuel Maleski’s life?” Samuel is charming, handsome, intelligent, a dedicated father. He should, by any possible expectation, find fulfillment. But, basically, it’s death by a thousand cuts — the house renovation takes longer than it should, the writing just isn’t coming, his wife is more successful than he is, his wife is starting to stray. Of the witnesses called for the prosecution, the most scathing is his therapist — who pins it all on Sandra. She emasculated and castrated Samuel, the therapist claims. There was a pattern of making him feel ever smaller. The culminating (or penultimate) conversation in Samuel’s life — his recorded argument with Sandra — is all about whether Samuel is a “victim” or not. To Sandra, it’s absurd — how could anybody living in a house that looks like this possibly have anything to do with victimhood? But, of course, within 24 hours, he absolutely is a victim — whether that’s at the hands of his wife who is so enraged by his passivity, his chronic mediocrity, that she finally applies the coup de grâce; or whether some inner drumbeat has just gotten too loud for him and he hurls himself from the balcony.

God, lawyers look cool in Europe

Which leads into the second guiding narrative: of whether the messy center of an adult life, of a long-term relationship, will always more or less look like Sandra and Samuel’s marriage just before his death. There will be fighting, long-simmering resentments, power imbalances, maybe some cheating, some physical violence. “There are times when a couple is a kind of chaos,” Sandra says. In the context of a criminal trial, it seems like dysfunction, seems like monstrousness — Sandra’s habit of “plundering” everything in their lives for her novels, the recording of their fight and the really vicious things she says to him — but Sandra’s claim, always, is that that’s not the “reality” of it. Even what’s caught on a recording — even what’s said to a therapist — is not actually truth. What’s on a recording is a snippet, what’s said to a therapist is, inevitably, a litany of grievances. There’s another side to it, which is that the two of them really are sharing a life, co-parenting, every so often (or at least so Sandra claims) cuddling on the couch — that she is there for his slide into self-loathing and despair, that she keeps waiting for him to pull himself out of it. 

I was always expecting the other shoe to drop. [MILD SPOILERS] I had the feeling that if Isabelle Huppert were in this movie — I kept picturing her in the lead — Sandra would have of course been stone-cold guilty, driven by some sadistic, remorseless pit at the center of her. But Triet wanted to make a different kind of film — a black box, based on unknowability, and gesturing towards the unfathomable complexity of relationships, of lived life. 

In the execution, it sometimes is more truncated than it should be. The fight captured on the recording is a bit mannered. The court scenes can drag into procedural. The discussions of writing have the usual tropes that writing-as-depicted-in-movies always seems to have: there’s either writer’s block or runaway, near-effortless success. And, maybe most importantly, Sandra’s relationship with Daniel is never as fleshed out as the film’s underlying structure calls for — it’s clear that she’s cold to him, but the real heart of the movie should be (and isn’t) his wrestling with his difficult relationship with his mother, his clear preference for his father but his epiphany in the midst of the trial that he must do everything, bend the truth if he has to, to save his mother. That’s all nestled in there, but there’s so much indirection in the Daniel scenes — so few actual interactions between mother and son — that it doesn’t quite come through. 

The other difficulty with Anatomy of a Fall is that I’m not entirely sure what the point is — what it wants to say. The movie sometimes seems to fall in love with its own steely reserve, its faithfulness to the processes of a trial. The emasculation-at-the-heart-of-contemporary-life theme is there. The married-life-is-too-complicated-for-even-highly-professional-lawyers-to-get-to-the-bottom-of theme is there. But we’re left looking for clues, say in the last shot. [SPOILER] Instead of the triumphant scene of Sandra reuniting with Daniel, Daniel goes to bed early, and Sandra is left to cuddle on the couch with Snoop (the much-misused family dog). In the end, I guess, it’s about loneliness, anomie — if Sandra knows what happened (and she probably does know more than she lets on), she’ll take the secret with her to her grave.