I had great hopes for it in depicting the terrible moral choices people in the camps often had to make just to survive (or help others to survive), but Son of Saul is, for me, a vile film. There are many Holocaust films that are pure kitsch and reprehensible simply for matters of taste, but this one especially uses an aggressive form of “international arthouse style” to cynically push a load of exploitative thriller tropes and audience-punishing emotional manipulation. For me, it exists on the same moral plane as something like Lee Frost’s
Love Camp 7.
There’s also the issue of the filmmakers
exploiting people, many of them homeless, working as background (literally lying around as naked corpses for entire days for which they were paid a dollar). The lead actor’s attempt to spin it as a positive is almost comically grotesque:
For his part, Röhrig claims the homeless extras’ experience was a positive one. “So it was extremely moving to me and others, so still today, I had messages from some of these homeless, old ladies, ‘Géza, congratulations, I can’t wait to see the movie.’ And they are on the computer of the homeless shelter, and waiting in line, and they go on the Facebook, the page of the movie, so when I say it’s a team effort, I really mean it,” he says.
It’s not a surprise to me that the director of this film is a vocal critic of Glazer’s Oscars speech.
I admit I’m a tough critic when it comes to fictionalized or dramatized films about the camps. I mostly agree with the sentiment that the actualities of the subject cannot and should not be addressed through entertainment (or through fictionalized, conspicuous “anti-entertainment” like
Son of Saul).
Zone of Interest takes an oblique approach by depicting everything that goes on outside the camps that makes what happens inside the camps possible. Some of the criticisms here that the actors should have been more attractive or more charismatic are just beyond my comprehension. They seem to express a desire for the Nazis to be either more alienating (we can’t identify with them because they are so much prettier than us) or more monstrous (we can’t identify with them because they are so obviously evil), when the entire point of the film is that they are exactly the same mundane, average, boring, workaday drones as we are. We are all equally as capable of making the small daily decisions that lead to or enable genocide.
This may be pedantic and condescending to say, but the much-cited “banality of evil” in Hannah Arendt’s coinage does not refer to, as many (not necessarily here) seem to be misinterpreting it, evil being banal (which, quite rightly, would be an objectionable concept), but of evil being made possible and achievable by banality—little daily decisions (even the decision simply to follow orders or to uphold the status quo) as individual grains of sand that eventually add up to a crushing weight. Höss was not a success because he was a charismatic leader, he was a success because he was a capable manager.
Zone takes great pains not to exploit the suffering of those in the camps and instead strives to pay small, quiet tributes to them in the use of the true story of the girl placing the apples outside the camp and her finding and playing the music written by a prisoner. I’m not sure it’s all successful or that it’s a towering, flawless film, but it’s making an effort not to trivialize or sentimentalize.