In 2015 Son of Saul, by Hungarian director László Nemes, came to Cannes, winning the director the Grand Jury Prize. This year sees Jonathan Glazer’s incredible German-language The Zone of Interest in competition. While the former takes place in a concentration camp and is seen from a prisoner’s perspective within the inner circles of that particular hell, The Zone of Interest shows concentration camp life from the other side of the barbed wire. But it is no less hellish for that and is almost as unbearable to watch as Nemes’s masterpiece.
The film opens with a dark screen, Mica Levi’s otherworldly and ominous music playing for a few minutes (Levi also wrote the score for Glazer’s Under the Skin). Before a single frame is shown, a sense of foreboding sets in. Yet the opening tableau depicts a Teutonic idyll: a family picnics by a slow-moving river, organza-clad girls picking flowers, their blond hair braided like their mother’s, while the male family members cavort and swim.
