2023-05-22 11:53:28
Arrived halfway through the Cannes Film Festival, two films can legitimately claim the prize… unease. Uneasiness born of the feeling that formal experiments sometimes go beyond the moral line – perhaps more austere – that their subjects demand.
shamelessness
In The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer decided to direct the family of the commandant of Auschwitz, spending peaceful days in a pavilion adjoining the camp… So what was the British director going to show about Auschwitz? This was the question on everyone’s lips, as the debates on the representation of concentration camp horror stirred up the 7th art. Jonathan Glazer probably had in mind the controversy that arose during the release of Schindler’s Listby Steven Spielberg (1993), accused by Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah (1985), by “trivializing the Holocaust”.
In The Zone of Interest, the horror thus always remains out of frame, suggested by the sound effects and a nauseating musical composition, as if played by instruments out of tune. The film manages to arouse fear in the face of “banality of evil”. But, wanting to give it a more modern twist, Jonathan Glazer adds dreamlike scenes, as if taken from a fairy tale. Are these formal boldnesses not out of place in this context?
At the roots of radicalization
Same question, same discomfort in front of Olfa’s Daughters, by the Tunisian Kaouther Ben Hania. By mixing real characters and professional actors to tell, in an astonishing game of mirrors, the story of this Tunisian mother and her four daughters, the two eldest of whom have joined the ranks of Daesh, the filmmaker seeks to go back to the roots of this radicalization.
She achieves her goal by digging deep into the intimacy of this family, but the “replayed” scenes from the past and the tears – real or simulated? – that they trigger in its protagonists embarrass. There is truth in his words, but also a shameless way of making misfortune an object of cinema.
#Zone #Interest #Daughters #Olfa #cinema #malaise