From Auschwitz to the echoes of Lolita in big cinema by Jonathan Glazer and Bilge Ceylan

It begins to appear in the official section of the Cannes Film Festival of the expected specific gravity. especially in Zone of interesta film by Jonathan Glazer that borrows its title from the author’s novel Martin Amis on Nazism to focus on that territory where the banality of evil becomes extreme. Glazer introduces us to the house where Auschwitz warden Rudolf Höss lived with his family, a few meters from the barracks and chimneys that blow the ashes of corpses, staining the laundry. And we are witnesses of how in that ground floor which is his aspirational lebensraum, the wife deals only with the achieved material well-being, her fields of azaleas, while in the background we hear the shots of percussion and the acrid smell of mass death permeates everything. But Höss – and his family – remain in their Zyklon-B Versailles, a pneumatic chamber of a meritocracy of horror. And the very white plastic of that contrast between the abyss of extermination and the daily political performance of Höss’s gas chambers in the palace in Oranenburg makes your blood run cold in this precise, superb film. The proposal of Turkish Nura Bilga Ceylan, already winner of the Palme d’Or, is also relevant. About dry herbs Ceylan deals with the moral hollowness of the teacher, his inappropriate relationship with Lolita from Anatolia and the vacuum of ideals of the burning earth, from whose trail or explosion only fragments of steely nihilism reach the film.