Favog

A few years ago I spent much of a day on a tour of the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps. Needless to say it was a sobering, soul-wrenching experience I will never forget. As part of the tour, our guide pointed out a large house mostly hidden behind a wall and we learned that this was where the Auschwitz camp commandant, Rudolph Hoess, lived with his wife and children while mass murder on an unimaginable scale was being conducted only barely hidden from easy view but certainly within earshot just yards away. We learned that Herr Hoess's wife Hedwig was delighted that her husband had been posted to this wonderful location where she could raise her children in a lovely home with a beautiful garden. Paradise on the doorstep of hell.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST limits itself to telling little more than the story of this family while they lived there. Theirs is a charmed existence filled with happy days enjoying hikes in the countryside picnics and swimming by the river, picking berries, splashing in the backyard pool, and only occasionally being perturbed by something as off-putting as the discovery of a stray body part in a riverbed or having to threaten a clumsy Jewish house servant with having her ashes scattered across the fields of Poland. The movie deals with the horror of Auschwitz not by showing it directly but by contrasting the beauty of what the viewer sees with the monstrous crime the viewer knows is being committed just out of sight; by contrasting the loving nature of the parents with the evil that lurks beneath and occasionally peeks through their smiling faces; by dramatizing the nonchalance with which the Nazis devised the most efficient ways to carry out mass murder.

I sincerely wondered how the family that was described to me on my tour could possibly have lived the way they did. Now I have seen what likely went on behind that wall. It's a good movie, quite interesting and well worth a watch.

I had to force myself to finish Anatomy of a Fall. I don't understand why people like it. Usually I enjoy the intelligent movie du jour, but not this one. The glacial pace was infuriating. For example, near the end, they were driving somewhere at night and the camera was looking out the front window of the car and the road just kept going by and then a turn and more road and a turn and more road and a turn and more road and a turn and what in the world was supposed to be going on here? It is an endless, interminable, monotonous, examination of how a man came to be dead. Eventually, with plot threads dangling in abundance, the movie ended and I found that to be a good thing. I will concede that the lead actress, Sandra Huller, did a magnificent job and will probably win an Oscar for her performance.

I like the Father Brown Mysteries TV series because I'm fond of the characters and the theme music and score are terrific and the cinematography is excellent, and it's a lot of fun. The plots, on the other hand, often leave a lot to be desired.

I'm working on Season 5 and I've just seen Episode #5, "The Hand of Lucia." And I have to say, if you are also a fan of the series, you really need to seek this one out. It is deliriously, awfully wonderful, more over-the-top than anything I've ever seen in a Father Brown episode, maybe even more crazy wacko wonderful than any TV mystery episode I've ever seen bar none, Hercule Poirot included. I laughed a lot.

In the series this year, Lady Felicia has departed to join her husband in Rhodesia, and Sid the chauffeur has basically gone AWOL. (I understand he's playing Lucius Malfoy in the West End Harry Potter play and he may even reappear with Father Brown briefly this season; I have my hopes up.) Meanwhile those two characters have been replaced by an attractive young woman, Lady Felicia's scandalous niece from London, and she's a perfectly fine addition to the cast. But she's no Lady Felicia. No Sid either, for that matter.

Season 5 is going along just fine; I'm enjoying it. But this episode I just watched -- The Hand of Lucia -- is, I think, an aberration, an episode so horribly, awfully funny it stands alone. It is like a parody of weekly British detective shows, Poirot/Morse/Lewis/Foyle lifted to a previously unexplored level of absurd TV mystery entertainment. It's a work of genius. You gotta see this one. It's so bad; it's so good.