Son of Saul
Son of Saul
An up close and personal view into agony…
This film is one of the most interesting ones I watched in 2015. Shot in a very personal point of view you never really clearly see the atrocities around but you get enough of it just by the amazing acting of the cast and the gradual story telling throughout. Currently on the running of an Academy award for Best foreign film. Son of Saul is going to be a tough one to beat.
In the waning days of the operations of the Auschwitz concentration camp, a Sonderkommando (a Jewish prisoner forced to assist the Nazi genocide) stoically goes through his ghastly routine. His group is planning a rebellion, but when he spies a young boy still breathing after a gassing, quickly dispatched by a Nazi doctor, he becomes obsessed with preserving the boy’s body for a proper Jewish burial, claiming him as the “Son of Saul.”
This extraordinary feature film debut from cowriter (with Clara Royer)/director László Nemes plunges us into a vision of hell. Using shallow depth of field, shot entirely on 35mm film and a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, cinematographer Mátyás Erdély (“Miss Bala,” “James White”) keeps us tightly within Saul’s (Géza Röhrig) point of view. The blurry background imagery is accompanied by the sounds of a death camp that stay with you and work better than if they’d been shot full on. The viewers minds fill in the horrific blanks.
The first thing we see is an out of focus long shot of men sitting in a field. We hear a train approaching and eventually Saul walks into focus, guiding new arrivals along a path into a chamber where we hear promises of work and a good salary, a shower followed by hot soup. Clothing is put onto pegs as everyone is herded into the next room. The door shuts and Saul immediately begins removing clothing from its hooks, the noise next door reaching a horrible crescendo before slowly dying away. He remains desperately stone faced as bodies are dragged along hallways, walls scrubbed of bodily fluids.
But there is that young boy who momentarily beat the odds. Saul finds an excuse to visit the autopsy room, begging one like himself the boy’s body not be cut. While his fellow Sonderkommando discuss plans to get pictures out and weapons in, Saul barely participates, instead taking great risk to find a rabbi and hide the boy’s body (it is unlikely that this is really the man’s son as several refute the existence of one). We see him inadvertently speed up one man’s death as he recruits a holy man among a crowd led to a mass grave. Another, clearly no rabbi to all but Saul, attempts to get away from him at the river where men shovel ashes into the water.
It is 1944 and the Nazis are in overdrive, the clock ticking down on their final solution, the chaotic situation an explanation for Saul’s ability to move about as his own timeline’s end approaches. But the rebellion comes to pass and Saul is one of many, the boy’s body
draped about his shoulders, who slips into the woods. Birdsong, less ironic than before, another river, another boy…
This film is very different from your general, Holocaust films. It puts you in the middle of what we can only imagine or have read in history books. Although deeply criticized Son of Saul is a brilliant piece of work about the last struggles of a man trying to keep his humanity when it appears lost making this a very moving and influential experience.
9 out of 10
