The Zone of Interest

The opening of Bradley Cooper's film, Maestro, is a title card with a quote from Leonard Bernstein:  

“A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”

I think that the director Jonathan Glazer believes that his film The Zone of Interest provokes questions, and there are certain stylistic decisions that Glazer makes that are meant to convince us that we're watching an important 'work of art'.  The path of least resistance would be to give Glazer a pass, and just accept that his film is a work of art because that's what he set out to accomplish.  Not so fast.  If we're going to utilize Bernstein's criterion for determining what qualifies as a work of art, then we must examine what the director delivers; if he fails to deliver, then his intent is inconsequential.  Starting the movie with a few minutes of a black screen definitely is a creative choice, and it did make me ask, "why is the screen still black?", and "is the projectionist having technical difficulties?", and "oh, I get it now, but how long is this going to last?", but those aren't the types of questions that lead me to conclusions about the essential meaning of the film.  Perhaps Glazer could have just started the movie without the black screen, and let the story speak for itself.  The film is set primarily within a compound, which consists of an idyllic house and a beautiful garden, where the commandant and his family live right next door to the concentration camp in Auschwitz.  Glazer doubles-down on his black screen idea, and decides that he'll gradually increase the frequency and intensity of the horrific sounds the emanate from the other side of the wall that separates the garden from the concentration camp.  As the family goes about their daily lives, doing the laundry, and digging the weeds, we hear gunshots, shouts of distress, and screams of terror, followed by eerie silence, and a distinct column of dark smoke rising from the stacks not much more than a stone's throw away.  The family members appear to be unfazed by the sounds that originate from the other side of the wall, it is as if there is no other side of the wall for them.  While Glazer's decisions and cinematic techniques are quite interesting, they never rise to the level of being thought-provoking.  I anticipated that a film with this premise would ask questions like, "how could a family digress to the point where they could find normalcy in such close proximity to evil and suffering?"  Instead, Glazer seems content to suggest that the family, since they are Nazis, consist entirely of heartless and soulless creatures, that only have the appearance of being real human beings.  Even the closing of the film, which consists of a modern-day tour of the museum at Auschwitz seems primarily to exist because all great movies that deal with The Holocaust must have a scene that ties everything to the present.  From a technical standpoint, the film was well made, and even effective in its own way.  Of note is the performance by Sandra Hüller, who plays the commandant's wife.  While she isn't as disturbing here as she was in her Best Actress nominated performance in Anatomy of a Fall, she definitely has an onscreen presence that cannot be ignored.  Overall I thought that this was a good film, but it clearly doesn't meet Bernstein's definition of a 'work of art' - if anyone cares.