Son Of Saul (15.)
Directed by László Nemes.
Starring Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn, Todd Charmont, Jerzy Walczak and Sándor Zsótér. Hungarian with subtitles. 107 mins.
As the film started the projectionist realised that the screen was in the wrong frame and it was hastily narrowed into the correct 4:3 aspect, the box-like, almost square ratio of 20th century televisions. It was an appropriate slip, emphasising the film's fierce and unrelentingly narrow focus. The winner of this year's Oscar for Best Film in a Foreign Language is a Holocaust film. It's also objectively, indisputably, as clear-as-the-nose-on-your-face brilliant piece of film making. These two things rarely overlap, probably haven't since Schindler's List. Generally the Holocaust film fails by coming at the subject with good intentions, sympathy and sorrow; Nazism scoffs at these higher emotions. To make a Holocaust film worth the bother, you need to come at it with the same dark humour, bad taste, methodical organisation and demented fury that the Nazis put into it. And you need to appreciate that filmed re-enactments of the Holocaust are their own little crimes against humanity.
The film's way in is through a simple, but strikingly effective conceit/ gimmick. It opens with an out of focus shot from which the face of Saul (Röhrig) emerges. From there the whole film is framed around his face, head and point of view: events in the camp, Auschwitz, are seen in the background as he is pushed, hassled and scurried around. It works brilliantly, because it expresses the sense of being overwhelmed by the incomprehensible horror of it all and reflects Saul's response, which is to close himself off from it, focus in on himself and his own survival. In the lead role Röhrig's expression barely changes for the entire film. Auschwitz was such an affront to normality that it can only be processed in slithers.
More than any film you have seen previously, Son of Saul puts you inside Auschwitz in 1944. Saul, a Hungarian Jew, is a Sonderkommando, the concentrate camp inmates drafted by the Nazis to work as cleaning units in the gas chambers. (With grim irony, they are marked out by a red cross painted on their backs.) Fearing they themselves are to be exterminated next, the Sonderkommandos are preparing an escape plan. Saul though has become fixated with the body of a small boy from his home town in Hungary and the idea of finding a rabbi to get him a proper Jewish burial.
The film is bold in having an entirely unsympathetic lead character. Before you see the film you may imagine that Saul's quest to do the right thing for the body of what might be his son would be a noble quest to complete a single dignified human act in a cauldron of insanity but as he blunders around, oblivious to his effect on the escape plans he becomes close to hateful.
Possibly the most depressing thing about the film is how infectious Nazism is. Everybody in the camp is hateful to one another. Everybody is pushing each other around, cursing them for any failing. When somebody is a little kind, a little reasonable, you can see how it costs them.
In his first full length feature, Nemes has come up with something that ranks up there with the greatest films on the subject. It reminded me of Elim Klimov's Come and See, a Russian film about the barbarism of the war with the Nazis on the Russian front, and another classic Hungarian film Miklos Jancso The Red and The White. With Come and See it shares a berserk and furious anger, a seething hatred for the Nazis that goes beyond what you normally find in respectable art films; with The Red and The White the ability to capture the upheaval and randomness of a war.
Directed by László Nemes.
Starring Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn, Todd Charmont, Jerzy Walczak and Sándor Zsótér. Hungarian with subtitles. 107 mins.
As the film started the projectionist realised that the screen was in the wrong frame and it was hastily narrowed into the correct 4:3 aspect, the box-like, almost square ratio of 20th century televisions. It was an appropriate slip, emphasising the film's fierce and unrelentingly narrow focus. The winner of this year's Oscar for Best Film in a Foreign Language is a Holocaust film. It's also objectively, indisputably, as clear-as-the-nose-on-your-face brilliant piece of film making. These two things rarely overlap, probably haven't since Schindler's List. Generally the Holocaust film fails by coming at the subject with good intentions, sympathy and sorrow; Nazism scoffs at these higher emotions. To make a Holocaust film worth the bother, you need to come at it with the same dark humour, bad taste, methodical organisation and demented fury that the Nazis put into it. And you need to appreciate that filmed re-enactments of the Holocaust are their own little crimes against humanity.
The film's way in is through a simple, but strikingly effective conceit/ gimmick. It opens with an out of focus shot from which the face of Saul (Röhrig) emerges. From there the whole film is framed around his face, head and point of view: events in the camp, Auschwitz, are seen in the background as he is pushed, hassled and scurried around. It works brilliantly, because it expresses the sense of being overwhelmed by the incomprehensible horror of it all and reflects Saul's response, which is to close himself off from it, focus in on himself and his own survival. In the lead role Röhrig's expression barely changes for the entire film. Auschwitz was such an affront to normality that it can only be processed in slithers.
More than any film you have seen previously, Son of Saul puts you inside Auschwitz in 1944. Saul, a Hungarian Jew, is a Sonderkommando, the concentrate camp inmates drafted by the Nazis to work as cleaning units in the gas chambers. (With grim irony, they are marked out by a red cross painted on their backs.) Fearing they themselves are to be exterminated next, the Sonderkommandos are preparing an escape plan. Saul though has become fixated with the body of a small boy from his home town in Hungary and the idea of finding a rabbi to get him a proper Jewish burial.
The film is bold in having an entirely unsympathetic lead character. Before you see the film you may imagine that Saul's quest to do the right thing for the body of what might be his son would be a noble quest to complete a single dignified human act in a cauldron of insanity but as he blunders around, oblivious to his effect on the escape plans he becomes close to hateful.
Possibly the most depressing thing about the film is how infectious Nazism is. Everybody in the camp is hateful to one another. Everybody is pushing each other around, cursing them for any failing. When somebody is a little kind, a little reasonable, you can see how it costs them.
In his first full length feature, Nemes has come up with something that ranks up there with the greatest films on the subject. It reminded me of Elim Klimov's Come and See, a Russian film about the barbarism of the war with the Nazis on the Russian front, and another classic Hungarian film Miklos Jancso The Red and The White. With Come and See it shares a berserk and furious anger, a seething hatred for the Nazis that goes beyond what you normally find in respectable art films; with The Red and The White the ability to capture the upheaval and randomness of a war.
