The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)

House & garden

Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest begins with a band of solid black held for an interminable time-- Mica Levi's sound collages growling from the big screen-- then cut to a German family picnicking on a lakeside meadow. They pack up, go home, arrive after sunset, fall asleep (mother and father in separate beds). Next morning father is hurriedly dressing but the children play a little game, blindfolding him and leading him to the front courtyard where they surprise him with a new canoe, and of course if you know anything about the film's premise you're waiting-- but even if you don't know anything you can't help but tense up as you wonder: why is the camera so claustrophobically locked in the direction of the house, why are we seeing the canoe only from one side and not the other? Finally father must leave, steps away from the canoe; cut to that long-anticipated reverse shot-- father climbs onto his horse, a guard tower looming over him as his animal walks him leisurely into work. 

The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002)

Survivor

Roman Polanski's The Pianist is surprising in more ways than one. You wouldn't think Polanski capable of filmmaking on this level anymore-- the kind of seemingly simple yet elegant visual storytelling that characterized major works like Rosemary's Baby or Chinatown (and was frustratingly evident in snatches of Frantic and The Ninth Gate). You wouldn't think Polanski capable of epic filmmaking of this scale either: the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the stretches of ruined city afterwards-- it's uncharacteristic of his work, the best of which stay at eye level and on intimate terms with their characters; they have an inwardness to them, a tendency to turn into solitary quests where the protagonist struggles against an inexplicable world bent on their destruction.

Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)

The dispossessed

(Warning: plot and narrative twists discussed in explicit detail)

Watching Andrez Zulawski's Possession (1981) again I was struck not so much by the violence and bodily fluids being flung about as I was by the feelings being wielded like so much casual cutlery. When it comes to extreme horror the film has been sadly left behind by more recent arthouse efforts such as Lars Von Trier's Antichrist or (for sheer masochistic suffering) Pascal Laugier's Martyrs-- 'sadly' not because this film should stay top of the heap but because the genre has chosen to go in this rather fruitless direction, to the point of numbness.

Son of Saul (Laszlo Nemes)

Saul surfer

Lazlo Nemes' extraordinarily shot and executed debut feature Son of Saul (Saul fia, 2015) answers a question I (and a few other folks) have been wondering about for some time: is there a new, fresh, perhaps even galvanizing way to realize the story of the Holocaust on the big screen?