Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 2023 and Oscar for best foreign film in 2024, this astonishing drama by Jonathan Glazer, and broadcast this Tuesday, November 5, 2024 on Canal+ at 9:10 p.m., left no one indifferent!
Chilling, striking, disturbing, overwhelming, monstrous… there are not enough qualifiers to evoke The Area of Interesta real cinematic shock at the start of 2024 and broadcast this Tuesday, November 5, 2024 at 9:10 p.m. on Canal+. A film also available on the platform MyCanal. British director Jonathan Glazer, who already made Scarlett Johansson a supernatural beauty in Under the Skin, tells the horror of the Shoah through the daily life of the commander of Auschwitz, the SS Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, played with as much coldness as talent by the German actress Sandra Hüller, 2024 César for best actress for Anatomy of a fall.
The trivialization of evil
A flower garden illuminated by the sun's rays, a vegetable garden, a swimming pool. In their vast and cozy property, the Höss family leads a peaceful life. The house has no vista except a large wall, behind which death reigns supreme, since it is the Auschwitz concentration camp. But the noise and glow of the ovens, the cries of the victims, the gunshots do not seem to disturb the peace of the Höss, unlike ours, which is deeply disturbed. Because thanks to remarkable work on sound (awarded at the 2024 Oscars), Jonathan Glazer puts spectators in the most total discomfort, by recounting the concentration camp horror without ever showing it directly on the image. A dive into the “banality of evil” to use the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt.
The Area of Interest : a unique work
The film is not limited to showing the daily life of a high-ranking Nazi dignitary and those close to him. He is also interested in the industrial nature of the Shoah. A particularly chilling scene perfectly illustrates this logic of productivity, during which we see Rudolf Höss and colleagues gathered around a table to discuss the deportation of 700,000 people from Hungary. “pieces” to talk about Jews. A coldness that we find elsewhere in a production that its filmmaker describes as “static, implacable, impassive”. An oh-so-ambitious aesthetic bias, which makes the work resolutely atypical but risks leaving certain spectators aside. And yet, despite its experimental form and its trying subject, The Area of Interest managed to bring together nearly 800,000 people in French cinemas. And remains one of the best films of the year 2024, which is urgent to discover.
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