Son of Saul" is an immersive experience of the most disturbing kind,
an unwavering vision of a particular kind of hell. No matter how many
Holocaust films you've seen, you've not seen one like this.
A
confident, audacious first feature by Hungarian director László Nemes
and winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, "Son of Saul" is carefully
focused on a 36-hour period inside Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944. It's not just the film's complete avoidance of special pleading and
sentimentality, nor the concentration camp setting that makes "Son of
Saul" simultaneously difficult to watch and impossible to turn away
from.
It's the powerful and impressive way director Nemes, his virtuoso
cinematographer, Mátyás Erdély, and the rest of the team combine
aesthetic choices and cinematic techniques to give viewers a terrifying
fictional glimpse of what it might have been like to be inside what
Nemes has called "a factory producing and eliminating corpses on an
industrial scale."
This glimpse is so potent and unprecedented
that it overshadows the story of one man's quest that Nemes and his
co-screenwriter, Clara Royer, have chosen to tell. To a certain extent
that narrative functions as a device that enables us to see more of the
charnel house chaos of Auschwitz-Birkenau (where part of Nemes' family
was killed) than we would otherwise encounter, a skeleton key, in
effect, to different circles of hell.
"Son of Saul" begins with text on screen defining the term Sonderkommandos,
a particular group of prisoners used by the Germans to do the grunt
work of extermination — soul-numbing tasks like removing and burning
bodies from gas chambers and scrubbing the floors clean for the next
group.
Also known as "bearers of secrets," the Sonderkommandos' specific
knowledge mandated that they be housed separately from the rest of the
camp and meant they worked only a few months before being executed
themselves. (A compilation of writings left behind by Sonderkommandos was the film's inspiration.)
"Son
of Saul" begins deliberately, with an out-of-focus shot. We see the
outline of a man walking forward and into focus, and once the camera
finds him, it shadows him like a second skin for the entire film, moving
when he moves, stopping when he stops, looking where he looks, seeing
only what he sees.
That
takes exceptional preparation by cinematographer Erdély and intricate
choreography with all the actors. Making things more complicated, Nemes
favors long takes (he worked as an assistant to the similarly inclined
fellow Hungarian Bela Tarr), so much so that this 1 hour, 47 minute film
reportedly contains only 85 shots.
The man in question, Saul
Auslander (the name translates as outsider or foreigner), a Hungarian
who speaks a smattering of Yiddish and wears, as do the other Sonderkommandos,
a jacket with an enormous red X on the back. He's effectively played by
Géza Röhrig, a poet and sometime actor whose face here is sullen,
impassive, to all intents and purposes dead to the world.
Saul
works at one of Auschwitz's crematoriums (nightmarishly designed by
production designer László Rajk in a warehouse outside Budapest and shot
and intended to be theatrically projected in 35 mm for added visual
texture). He is part of a team that herds terrified Jews to undressing
rooms, where they are told they will be assigned jobs after they take
"showers."
As each group is being gassed, Saul and his compatriots
quickly dispose of their clothing (after searching it for valuables)
and then deal with the corpses and the mess, all at double time.
Saul
is consistently shot in shallow focus, which means that the dead
bodies, the beatings, all the classic horrors of the camps, are visible
only in the corners of the frame or half-glimpsed in the background.
This normalization of nightmare both presents the world as Saul saw it
and increases our shock that this kind of savage dehumanization could be
experienced in such a business as usual way.
Essential in
creating the nightmare ambience of the camp is "Son of Saul's" complex,
layered soundtrack, which takes the place of a conventional score and
assaults us with a constant barrage of screams and moans, the sounds of
beatings and the off-screen desperation of people fighting not to die.
Nemes told his superb sound designer Tamás Zányi that sound would create
50% of the movie, and he was not exaggerating.
The story
co-writers Nemes and Royer place in this maelstrom is really quite a
simple one. A boy unexpectedly survives, for a few minutes, the gas
chamber, and when Saul sees him, he is seized by the idea that this boy
is his son.
While
the film is intentionally vague about whether the boy actually is
Saul's son, there is no doubt about the nature of the man's ever more
manic determination to find a rabbi to say kaddish, the prayer for the
dead, for the boy, and then give him a proper burial.
Monomania
can became tedious, even in a situation like this, but Saul's zeal takes
him out of his usual routines and allows the film to take us on a kind
of devil's walkabout and reveal other aspects of the camps. We see
crematorium ashes being shoveled into a river, people being shot and
shoved into pits en masse by the hellish light of flamethrowers, even
the taking of clandestine photographs and the beginnings of a Sonderkommando rebellion (things that actually happened at Auschwitz).
Stunning
as all this is, "Son of Saul" by definition lacks the ultimate horror
provided by actual footage as seen in almost unbearable documentaries
such as the recent "Night Will Fall." But that shouldn't take anything
away from the accomplishment — and the necessity — of this film.
Careful
to respect survivor Primo Levi's famous dictum about Auschwitz — "Here
there is no why" — "Son of Saul" makes no attempt to explain events that
in many ways remain beyond human comprehension.
But the film
believes, accurately, that there is value in renewed attempts to depict
what happened, that treating the Holocaust as something it would be
sacrilegious to attempt to represent serves no purpose. It's essential
for us as a culture to continually see and understand that this was not
an aberration, that people did this to other people and could do it
again. Having films like "Son of Saul" made and seen is our best hope of
that not happening.
source kenneth.turan@latimes.com
1 comMENTS:
Esas películas no tienen credibilidad, desde hace tiempo, gracias a las labores de investigación de los revisionistas, algunos de éstos revisionistas todavía encarcelados o asesinados por el mero hecho de investigar la Historia.
Gracias por la noticia, no sabía de una nueva película de ésta temática, que no veré.
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