The Zone of Interest (2023)
- Reviewed from the 2023 Cannes Film Festival
2023 年戛纳电影节点评
Primo Levi wrote that Auschwitz sounded like “a hubbub of people without names or faces drowned in a continuous deafening background noise from which, however, the human word did not surface.” A defining quality of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest – essentially the domestic drama of a Nazi officer and his family, stringently confined to their worldview – is the sound-designed tumult of Auschwitz: like the ambient machine hum of an industrial park near a field, dotted with gunshots, yells, screams. The camp is heard but barely glimpsed in the film, its smokestacks and watchtowers peeking above the walls of SS officer Rudolf Höss’s house and grounds; the sounds as heard in the film are the opposite of deafening, they are distant, blurred, their horrors pushed to the absolute periphery of indifference.
普里莫·莱维（Primo Levi）写道，奥斯威辛集中营听起来就像“一群没有名字或面孔的人淹没在持续不断的震耳欲聋的背景噪音中，然而，人类的语言并没有浮出水面。”乔纳森·格雷泽 (Jonathan Glazer) 的《兴趣区》本质上是一部纳粹军官及其家人的家庭剧，严格局限于他们的世界观，其一个决定性特征是奥斯威辛集中营的声音设计骚动：就像田野附近工业园区的机器嗡嗡声。 ，点缀着枪声、叫喊声、尖叫声。影片中可以听到这个集中营的声音，但几乎看不到它的踪影，它的烟囱和了望塔在党卫军军官鲁道夫·霍斯的房屋和场地的墙壁上方窥视；电影中听到的声音与震耳欲聋相反，它们是遥远的、模糊的，它们的恐惧被推到了冷漠的绝对边缘。
With The Zone of Interest, it’s as if Glazer has responded to the idea of the Holocaust as unrepresentable not just by rendering absence – the film opens with at least a minute of black screen over Mica Levi’s banshee soundscapes – but by racking focus on a slice of Germany society. And so, we observe Christian Friedel’s Rudolf Höss, workaholic and fond but preoccupied papa, and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Huller), a homemaker with a penchant for gardening and a fussy visiting mother. The main conflict is Höss’s transfer to another assignment, to which Hedwig protests, “This is our home … Everything we want is on our doorstep.”
在《兴趣区》中，格雷泽似乎对大屠杀不可再现的想法做出了回应，不仅仅是通过渲染缺席——影片以米卡·莱维的女妖音景上至少一分钟的黑屏开始——而是通过将焦点集中在一个切片上德国社会的。因此，我们观察到克里斯蒂安·弗里德尔饰演的鲁道夫·霍斯，一个工作狂、热爱但又全神贯注的爸爸，和他的妻子海德薇（桑德拉·胡勒饰），一个热爱园艺的家庭主妇和一位挑剔的来访母亲。主要冲突是霍斯调任另一项任务，海德薇抗议道，“这是我们的家……我们想要的一切都在我们家门口。”
Point of view is Glazer’s virtuosic obsession, folding us into the warp and weft of unfamiliar zones: an extraterrestrial hunter in Under the Skin (2013), the fixation on a taboo reincarnation in Birth (2004), even Ben Kingsley’s hectoring gangster in Sexy Beast (2000), bullying people into a new reality. In contrast to the helmet-cam-style scrum of Son of Saul (2015), or the lucid calm before the storm of Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009) – both Cannes prize-winners – Glazer and cinematographer Lukasz Zal lock us down with sunny yet cool imagery shot using wide lenses that keep the Höss’s at arm’s length, especially, it seems, their faces. A sickliness seeps through slightly off-kilter camera placements and heights, while the delivery of spa travel plans and oven mass death logistics is low-key and routine.
视角是格雷泽精湛的痴迷，将我们带入陌生地带的经纬：《皮囊之下》（2013）中的外星猎人，《诞生》（2004）中对禁忌转世的执着，甚至是《性感野兽》中本·金斯利（Ben Kingsley）的威吓黑帮（2000），欺凌人们进入新的现实。与《索尔之子》（Son of Saul，2015）中头盔摄像头式的混乱，或者哈内克的《白丝带》（The White Ribbon，2009）暴风雨前的清醒形成对比——这两位戛纳电影节获奖者——格雷泽和电影摄影师卢卡斯·扎尔（Lukasz Zal）用阳光明媚的方式锁定了我们。然而，使用广角镜头拍摄的很酷的图像使霍斯夫妇保持一定的距离，尤其是他们的脸。稍微不平衡的摄像机位置和高度会渗透出一种病态的感觉，而水疗旅行计划和烤箱大规模死亡后勤的交付则低调而例行公事。
This quality of self-absorption is what Glazer’s film adapts, or adopts, from Martin Amis’s novel, The Zone of Interest, whilst discarding swaths of plot and people, including the officers (engaged in perpetual cocksmanship) and, well, the prisoners. Instead, we are trapped within Rudolf’s mundane workplace drive and Hedwig’s bustling about (at one point donning a fur coat stolen from a dead prisoner, part of a haul of belongings dumped on the kitchen table up for grabs). More than Amis’s Zone of Interest, however, his book Time’s Arrow came to mind with its thought experiment of narrating the Holocaust backwards, in a cinematic reversal of its activity. Glazer’s film, too, feels like a self-contained exercise (at times flirting with dark-as-the-void satire).
格雷泽的电影改编或采用了马丁·艾米斯的小说《兴趣区》中的这种自我专注的品质，同时抛弃了大片情节和人物，包括军官（从事永久的鸡奸行为），还有囚犯。相反，我们被困在鲁道夫平凡的工作场所和海德薇的忙碌之中（有一次，我们穿着一件从死去的囚犯身上偷来的毛皮大衣，这是一堆被扔在厨房桌子上等待抢夺的物品的一部分）。然而，不仅仅是艾米斯的《兴趣区》，他的书《时间之箭》也因其以电影般的方式倒叙大屠杀的思想实验而浮现在脑海中。格雷泽的电影也感觉像是一部独立的作品（有时带有黑暗的讽刺意味）。
It must be said that the banality of the Höss family and the bureaucracy of genocide are no revelation, and there’s something wrongheaded in Glazer’s cold replication of their murderous perspective and peekaboo roundabout glimpses of the Nazi atrocity (incidentally, László Nemes already went here with his immersive 2007 short about a Nazi clerk, With a Little Patience (2007)). The Zone of Interest has its chilling effects: a young child overhears a prisoner being punished; his older brother, also seen clad in Hitler Youth uniform, plays with the loose teeth of the dead. And Glazer can be counted upon for radical shake-ups. Mysterious night-vision sequences of a girl (resembling a photonegative) pop up when Höss reads his children a Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. An elegant flash-forward to the present time brings us within the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, mundanely tended by cleaners; the film was in fact partly shot there, with permission. The promised Nazi empire is nowhere in sight, partly an Ozymandian effect, partly something like Sergei Loznitsa’s portrayal of visits to camps in Austerlitz (2016). An accompanying moment with Rudolf seems to evoke, bafflingly, the retching rush of self-consciousness near the end of The Act of Killing (2012).
必须要说的是，霍斯家族的平庸和种族灭绝的官僚主义并不是什么启示，格雷泽冷酷地复制了他们的凶残视角和对纳粹暴行的躲闪式迂回一瞥，这有些错误（顺便说一句，拉斯洛·内梅斯已经带着他的2007 年关于纳粹职员的身临其境的短片《有一点耐心》(2007)。兴趣区有其令人不寒而栗的效果：一个年幼的孩子无意中听到一名囚犯受到惩罚；他的哥哥也穿着希特勒青年团的制服，正在玩弄死者松动的牙齿。格雷泽可以指望进行彻底的变革。当霍斯给他的孩子们读《汉塞尔和格蕾特》童话故事时，一个女孩的神秘夜视序列（类似于底片）突然出现。优雅的闪回将我们带入了奥斯威辛-比克瑙国家博物馆，这里由清洁工平凡地打理着。事实上，这部电影的一部分是在获得许可的情况下在那里拍摄的。承诺的纳粹帝国却遥不可及，部分是奥兹曼德效应，部分类似于谢尔盖·洛兹尼察对参观奥斯特利茨集中营的描述（2016）。令人费解的是，与鲁道夫一起度过的时刻似乎令人困惑地唤起了《杀戮的行为》（2012）接近尾声时自我意识的强烈反胃。
Glazer’s removed camerawork lets the Nazi project play out with the deadpan horror of a dystopia, even as it notably avoids techniques that might foster an emotional identification with the family dynamics and actually shake up an audience. The main possible takeaway that could redeem the film is the possible parallel between the Hösses and anyone currently participating in the systems of a murderous nationalist state while maintaining the veneer of civilisation. This was a parallel acidly volunteered by one Russian viewer I spoke to, but the lingering on office meetings and letter dictation could also extend to evoking boardroom and backroom decisions made with full knowledge of their deadly consequences.
格雷泽删除的摄影作品让纳粹项目呈现出反乌托邦的面无表情的恐怖，尽管它明显避免了可能促进对家庭动态的情感认同并实际上震撼观众的技术。拯救这部电影的主要可能收获是，霍斯家族与目前参与凶残民族主义国家体系、同时保持文明外表的任何人之间可能存在相似之处。这是我采访过的一位俄罗斯观众尖酸刻薄地自愿提出的类似说法，但办公室会议和信件听写中的挥之不去也可能会引发董事会和幕后在充分了解其致命后果的情况下做出的决定。
But above all: whatever the frissons of Glazer’s perspectival gambit, why this story alone, instead of millions of others? At one point, a Höss daughter plays on the piano a song composed by Joseph Wulf, a German-Polish Jewish historian and survivor who pushed to publicise the full extent of Nazi deeds. It’s an eerie moment, with its lyrics in subtitles evoking the camps, like some final fugitive cry of anguished truth. In the end, Wulf died by suicide, despairing as he watched postwar German authorities continue to tell only a selective portion of history.
但最重要的是：无论格雷泽的视角策略如何令人颤抖，为什么只是这个故事，而不是其他数以百万计的故事？有一次，霍斯的女儿在钢琴上弹奏一首由约瑟夫·沃尔夫创作的歌曲，约瑟夫·沃尔夫是一位德裔波兰犹太历史学家和幸存者，致力于宣传纳粹行为的全部内容。这是一个令人毛骨悚然的时刻，其歌词的字幕让人想起集中营，就像痛苦的真相最后的逃亡呼喊。最终，沃尔夫自杀身亡，他绝望地看着战后的德国当局继续只讲述历史的一部分。