Two very different new films rise to the challenge—up to a point
crying, but whose: the one in the nursery or someone else’s child, beyond the garden wall topped with barbed wire? A dog is barking, but is it the family pet or a far more menacing animal? In “The Zone of Interest” , an ambitious new film byEvery director who grapples with the Holocaust—from Mr Glazer to Steven Spielberg, whose landmark hit “Schindler’s List” came out 30 years ago—faces a daunting, possibly insuperable challenge.
Whereas “The Zone of Interest” is arty , “One Life” is as unflashy as its protagonist. He is not a mass-murderer but a rescuer:, a self-effacing stockbroker who helped spirit 669 mostly Jewish children from Prague to Britain on the eve of war. He embodies what you might call the banality of goodness, his feat requiring as much dogged paperwork as derring-do. James Hawes, the director, uses a dual time-frame.
In the matter of the horror, though, the films are alike in their restraint. The most heart-rending scenes in “One Life” involve desperate partings on train platforms or old photos of lost children. There is vanishingly little violence. The two films stand in tactful contrast to others that intrude into the gas chambers. Back Story’s reservation about them is as much a question of timing as content. Are such oblique tales an apt way to dramatise the Holocaust now?
Its place in Western culture has become vexed. Commemorated in museums, memorials and memoirs, it can often seem inescapable. At the same time, as the Holocaust slips out of living memory it is widely misrepresented, even forgotten. It is a common touchstone in political disputes, not least for voices on both sides in the tragedy ofIn this context, the urgent job of storytellers is to remember—to insist on—the victims, not just the perpetrators or heroes.