SON OF SAUL (Saul Fia)
Sony Pictures Classics
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten for CompuServe ShowBiz. Databased on Rotten Tomatoes.
Grade: B
Director: László Nemes
Written by: Clara Royer, László Nemes
Cast: Gézá Röhrig, Levente Monar, Urs Rechn, Tood Charmont, Sándor Zsotér, Marcin Czarnik, Jerzy Walczak
Screened at: Sony, NYC, 9/30/15
Opens: December 18, 2015
As you watch László Nemes’s “Son of Saul” with its realistic mélange of Hungarian, German and Yiddish dialogue, you might become even more enraged at the pronouncements of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When Ahmadinejad assured us that the Holocaust was merely an invention to garner sympathy for the desire for a home in the Jews’ ancestral land, he was either a stupid man or one who cleverly used propaganda for domestic consumption. Just notice what “Son of Saul” director Nemes shows us in portraying life in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious death camp which the Nazis constructed in Poland. The Polish partisans smuggled a camera to the inmates to allow them secretly to photograph the gruesome crematoria and gas chamber, with a look at some of the thousands of naked bodies pouring into the chamber thinking they were about to take a shower to delouse themselves. Writers in the camps hid descriptive notes within the walls, assuming that they would be killed like all the others leaving no survivors to tell the tales of the treatment dished out by the German and guards at the camp and even by fellow Jews serving the Germans as Capos, or Jewish police. What emerges from Nemes’s feature which he co-wrote with Clara Royer is a picture of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, a year that Germany knew it would be defeated by the Allies, its camp officials determined to kill seemingly endless convoys of Jews before the Russians would enter and liberate them.
Holocaust pictures, books and theatrical pieces can be tallied not in the scores but in the hundreds, surely not because they are entertaining but rather because the Holocaust was, like the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, among the seminal events of the 20th Century. (This is why I shuddered on the way up the elevator to the screening when one of the security officials, meaning well but ignorant of the subject of the film, said, “Enjoy”)! “Son of Saul” focuses largely on its central character, Saul Ausländer, a Hungarian member of the camp’s Sonderkommandos, responsible along with 100-200 others for lying to the Jews who are entering the gas chamber, telling them to leave their clothing on hooks,to remember the number of their hooks, and come out of the “shower” quickly before the “soup gets cold.” Men and women, naked together, would enter but, since the director states that he is not making a horror film (he could have fooled me), he would not take the cameras inside but would merely allow the victims to shout and scream and bang on the door.
All is told from Saul’s viewpoint, which is why your theater curtain may close partway to give the audience the sense of a narrowed vision with its slim aspect ratio. To make sure we all understand that this is Röhrig’s movie, all from his point of view, “Nemes opens the movie on a long close-up at Saul’s troubled face as the protagonist simply stares as though in disbelief at the mayhem surrounding him, with people moving about, removing bodies from the gas chamber, burning them (the bodies are called “pieces” and each human being lying lifeless is called “it”). After each removal, the Sonderkommandos are ordered to scrub the floor clear of all evidence of death and to operate quickly because a new convoy would soon arrive.
You could not think of a more squalid place on this earth than this camp, where dead bodies, after burning, would convert to mountains of ashes thrown into the river. Now Saul has a special mission, one that you may find unbelievable given the huge numbers of victims. One young boy survived the gas, only the second time in the memory of at least some of the guards, though his breathing was shallow and he was near death. A Hungarian doctor who is a prisoner is ordered to autopsy the young man to see how he was able to survive. Saul claims that the boy is his own, though from a different woman than his wife, but whether he means this metaphorically as Arthur Miller must have meant when he entitled his first play “All My Sons” or means this literally is anybody’s guess. Ausländer is determined to give this boy a proper Jewish burial by finding a rabbi to recite Kaddish—which is a prayer for the dead—and then bury him as demanded by Jewish law and tradition. Considerable dialogue is taken up by Ausländer’s querying his fellow Sonderkommandos, “Are you a rabbi?” while at the same time he is helping to stage a rebellion—one which actually took place in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 and was the only such action by the prisoner throughout the way.
Röhrig is a strong presence, charismatic some might say, delivering a fine performance though he is not a professional actor. He is rather a Budapest-born writer and poet who now resides in New York and is at work on a book. Mátyás Erdély’s cinematography enhances the strength of the man’s features, concentrating now and then on long takes, as the anxiety-ridden character holds on to the need to do what’s right for his “son.” This is a film without a typical narrative, but one which rather emphasizes how the camp functioned, like an assembly line really, the Sonderkommandos getting much better food than the watery soup fed to other inmates so allow them to do the heavy work of fetching, burning bodies, and disposing of mountains of ashes. It’s perhaps the most visceral experience you’ll receive this year on celluloid but is not necessarily a film that will be favored even by audience members who avidly seek out Holocaust works. To some “Son of Saul” is little more than a progression of noisy desperation. To others, who value true-to-life recreations in their films, it is among the prizes of the subgenre, one of the most realistic depictions of its century’s most horrendous, even unbelievable, event.
The folks at the Cannes Festival thought highly enough to award “Son of Saul” the Grand Prix, while Toronto’s and New York’s film festivals have given the picture their homes. “Son of Saul” is also Hungary’s official selection for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
Rated R. 107 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – B-
Acting – B+
Technical – B+
Overall – B
