Worth: $15.00
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Cast:
Christian Friedel, Sandra Huller, Ralph Herforth
Intro:
... stark and uncompromising ...
This stark and uncompromising film from Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Under the Skin) has arrived with much foreign press critical acclaim. It is based on the late-career novel of the renowned fictional stylist Martin Amis. The source material is impeccable, but it was always going to be a challenge, as it is an almost-unfilmable book. Almost.
It tells the story of high-ranking Nazi Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel) and his family who live next door to the camp that he oversees. The camp is Auschwitz, a name that has become a metonym for the ultimate horror of the Final Solution.
This is not a topic that can easily be tackled, although of course there are many films that deal with Germany in this period.
Amis and Glazer’s approach reminds us of the power of euphemism. This is a linguistic trick we still rely upon, of course. A steel knife cutting into flesh in a hospital is known as a ‘procedure’, two cars crashing in a heap of flesh and metal is known as a ‘traffic incident’, and so on. It is as if we hope to tame the phenomenon by neutral language. But, in another way, it can only hold so long, and Glazer’s film plays that tension between the surface calm and the disruptive reality below.
It is an interesting choice. The film is formal and austere almost to the point of incomprehensibility. In a way, what happened was incomprehensible. How could that have happened, and at such a scale for so many years? Who was actually doing it, and how could the people next door to the hundreds of camps (yes, hundreds) have not got a whiff of the reality? Glazer doesn’t go into these questions, as that is not his focus, but they hover around the text like ashes floating in the wind.
Instead, Glazer is determined to show just family life with all its minor moments of happiness and unhappiness. We never go inside the camp, really. Hedwig (the about-to-break-through globally Sandra Huller (Toni Erdmann, Anatomy of a Fall) is doing her best to keep house. In many ways, she considers herself lucky – she has a beautiful abode and garden, charming little children, an abundance of servants and helpers and a handsome powerful Nazi husband. Sometimes she is lonely though, as Rudolf goes off every day to do his banally evil job. Hoss himself is mostly either distracted or pensive. He is beset by problems and technical glitches all the time. He has targets to meet, and the trains just keep coming. There are so many ‘pieces’ to be ‘processed’. It is the logistics that keep him up at night not the nature of the business. On top of that, he has to wrestle with the complicated politics of the various Hitler cronies who jockey for the Fuhrer’s favour.
One aspect that the book concentrates upon, but which is more or less absent here, is Hoss’s nagging libido. He is driven as much by lust as power, and in a taboo-less world, he can satiate himself whenever he wants. But nothing satisfies.
Some might find the film too elliptical and even a little boring. In a weird way, not much happens. A lot of footage is devoted to shots of the empty house, or of corridors and rooms being tidied. Often, the camera angle is low, as if it is a child sneaking into a room full of adults and not wanting to disturb. The palette is mostly sombre greys and browns with only the occasional bright summery scene of a picnic or party for contrast. Even then, the camera mostly keeps its distance.
Both Huller and Friedel flesh out their characters skilfully enough, but the restraint is always there. While we can see that they have dilemmas, we do not want to get so close to them as to be in danger of sympathy. Perhaps, given that we pretty soon know exactly where the house is located and what is going on ’next door’, there is little danger of that.
In the end, the film leaves with a sort of shrug. It ends as it began with blankness and ordinariness and yet, at some level, we know that things will never be the same again. As Adorno suggested, after Auschwitz, poetry is no longer possible.
