It was our palme d’or. In The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer adapts Martin Amis’ novel set in Auschwitz in his relentless and chilling way. The film describes the daily life of a Nazi family housed right next to the camp and indifferent to the horror. At the end of the garden, death is signaled by shouts and industrial noises. The banality of evil in all its horror. The 58-year-old director has therefore just been awarded the Grand Prix. Fourth feature film in a career that began twenty-three years ago, it was the Briton’s first appearance at the Cannes Film Festival.
Jonathan Glazer cultivates a remarkable sense of suspense and marketing. Before Cannes, we only knew that The Zone of Interest was inspired by the novel by Martin Amis, who has just died. “I was offered to go to a casting without telling me which film, actress Sandra Hüller told us in Cannes. We don’t have this taste for secrecy in Germany so it was obvious that it was a foreign director. I first read three or four pages without knowing what it was about exactly. I then learned that Jonathan Glazer was behind this project and that he was talking about the Höss family. »
The Zone of Interest is an A24 production, the American studio behind the cream of auteur cinema (Uncut Gems, Lady Bird by Greta Gerwig, First Cow, The Whale, Everything Everywhere All at Once). Contrary to custom, he did not show The Zone of Interest to distributors before Cannes. Bac Films bought it for more than a million euros blindly, without reading the script or seeing the film, on the name and reputation of its author. A screening the day before Cannes allowed them to reassure themselves about the investment.
The first part of Jonathan Glazer’s career was spent directing commercials (Levi’s) and music videos (Radiohead, Blur). Passed to the cinema in 2000, Jonathan Glazer never tells simple stories. Sexy Beast, in 2000, put two gangsters back to back in the tense atmosphere of a villa on the Spanish coast. “I liked his advertisements and his music videos for which he received numerous international awards, explained Ben Kinglsey, in 2001, who played one of the two characters. Jonathan has style, a universe of his own. »
Universe which expanded in 2004 with Birth. A fantastic tale à la Rosemary’s Baby, co-scripted by Jean-Claude Carrière, in which Nicole Kidman encounters the ghost of her late husband reincarnated as a ten-year-old boy… Psychological ambiguity mixed with the supernatural. In 2013, Jonathan Glazer made an impression with Under the Skin, unveiled at the Venice Film Festival, where Scarlett Johansson played a vengeful and sexy alien in the streets of Edinburgh. Between this very stylized genre film and The Zone of Interest, the director had shot nothing, except an installation at the Coachella festival in 2011 and a hallucinatory short film, in 2019, The Fall. After his Grand Prix award, his next film should arouse even greater expectation.
