So, you'd think, idyllic on one side of the wall, hell on earth on the other; roll end credits. But the point of this film is to live with these people and watch them. You are free to judge them, as all history has, but once you get over that you might just be overtaken by your fascination. When Hedwig takes delighted delivery of fine clothes, she gets the pick of them in a huge fur coat while the local servants are given lingerie items to choose. Late at night, on the top bunk bed, the older son uses a torch, not to read a comic but to look at and play with extracted teeth with gold fillings.
At no point are we led to believe that these people, even the kids, are unaware of what happens over the wall. While we see none of it directly on screen, the audio is constantly haunted by the sounds of gun fire, barking dogs and sergeants, and massive machinery. While we grasp with relief at Rudolf's concern over daily matters and his relatable anxiety as he delays telling Hedwig about the move, we also listen as he near-erotically tell his wife over the phone how he imagines gassing everyone at the lavish Nazi reception he's attending (we see them in a startling extreme high shot), how the problem to solve is to deal with the high ceiling. There is none of the cognitive dissonance suggested by Hannah Arendt's coinage "banality of evil" (itself long blanched by overuse): it is a life of choice.
Jonathon Glazer, a director whose work is very much film by film rather than an auteurist whole, is an ace at Kubrickian world building. Take the house and garden out of the context and we'd go to that air bnb without a second thought. The house is pristine but really feels lived in. The constant smokestack with its infernal glow and thick black plumes keep the context running without an off switch. Hedwig's mother is haunted by the sight, she wakes and goes to the window at night, staring into the fire and smoke with what looks like a nausea she will know until her last breath. When we see Rudolf in the grand settings of Nazi homebase, he walks along corridors and staircases that are so solid and intimidating that one slip would surely end in a major fracture. The uniformed clerks of genocide move through the halls and ornate interiors they seem disturbingly made for them. The single act of resistance is shown in a stark negative process as a girl hides fruit in the soil of the work areas around the camp. One of these sequences uses the widescreen to the full as she does this beneath the slivery plumes of exhaust from the prisoner trains clanking overhead. The quiet heroism of it and the refusal to use conventional cinematic triggers to enhance it make it deliver a gut punch.
The dialogue is mostly in German (no Cherman eccented English which would have distracted) and the cast is either German or Polish as the characters are. Christian Friedel as Rudolf delivers a man of his circumstances, vulnerable here to the protean forces in his family life and icily efficient in the carriage of his career. It is a thanklessly nuanced performance. Sandra Huller, though, is the heart of the film and also the poster girl of its proffered puzzle. Far from resting as the baby-machine the Reich demanded she be, she is a fiery homemaker and obstinate ruler of her lebensraum (a Nazi-era term she makes poignant use of in an argument with Rudolf) and she is, without a moment's ambiguity, a Nazi from the marrow out: she delivers this shock in steady doses so we never quite feel numbed by it, but shock is what it is.
We still need art about atrocities. In an era where we are shocked by the continued incidence of military violence, it is well to be reminded that we are still not very far from sticks and stones and that the volume of millennia has not lifted us beyond all that. And when we find ourselves back, looking on like drivers around a pile up, it is well we recall how the smoke over the wall is made. Glazer has given us another reminder. I had feared on going in that I was in for a flat moving art installation of a movie but when the frozen opening of Mica Levi's extraordinary music against a dark, featureless background gave way to the glistening riverside idyll, I knew I was in good hands. There is warmth here. There probably shouldn't be, but it's what keeps us watching and then it's also what starts to worry us. And that's only right.
No comments:
Post a Comment