A trip to hell.
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| Son of Saul is hard to watch, but important. |
Within the first seven minutes of the Hungarian drama Son of Saul, know that you are going to witness something remarkable. It is a trip to hell; the hell which was created by mankind during bleak years of World War II. Set in Auschwitz-Birkenau during October 1944, the film tells the tale of an extermination camp worker Saul Auslander, who takes a dead boy for his son and makes his aim to give him a proper burial.
Saul is a sonderkommando, a class of Jewish prisoners who opt to work in the camps, rather than inhale hydrogen cyanide on arrival. They are the secret-keepers, as the unaware prisoners reaching Auschwitz do not know that they are in for a slaughter-house. Saul, along with hundreds of other workers, have their fixed daily routine - they pick up valuable times from the belongings of the dead, scrub the floors of gas chambers, transfer the dead bodies from the chambers to the incineration furnaces, collect the ashes and shovel them down in the nearby river. The workers are mocked and threatened at every passing minute by the Nazi officers, but given the revolting work they do, they are slightly better fed than their prisoner counterparts. Saul has seen many deaths and mutilations. He is always surrounded with constant screams and his work is to aid killings of his own
people. As a result, he has grown indifferent over the time, wearing a static expression, which somewhat feels normal. Nothing shocks him, nothing shakes him up. But when a boy who miraculously survived the gassing is softly killed in front of Saul's eyes, a flicker of humanity in him is ignited in the hell-fire of Auschwitz. He is determined to
bury the boy with the help of a Rabbi for Kiddish ritual, which may sound like a
fool's errand in an extermination camp; but sometimes somethings are done for without apparent reason or logic. The actor playing Saul, Géza
Röhrig, acts with such a command that you never believe that he is
actually a poet living in New York, not a renowned thespian.
The script for Son of Saul is relatively straight-forward, with our protagonist Saul risking his life to give the dead boy a proper burial. Director-writer László Nemes also takes a dash from the history and we see the Birkenau revolt up close and personal. But the approach here is definitely not straight-forward. We see all the events of 36-hour time-frame with Saul. I mean this literally, as the camera is constantly fixed upon his face, over his shoulder, his back or sometimes in front of him. Throughout the film, we follow him like a shadow. Cinematographer Mátyás Erdély strictly uses shallow focus and has shot the film in 4:3 aspect ratio. The resultant imagery is claustrophobic, blocked and restricted.
Such a photographic technique would dilute the impact of the immersive experience of the viewer. But with this film, it is completely the opposite - Son of Saul is closest to reality. You are trapped in the concrete walls of the camp lighted with bulbs radiating warm hues; you try to see through the unfocused background from which the source of an unseen sound is coming, or to see some grisly inhumane sin. It is a psychological trick and Nemes uses it to a great effect. The soundtrack of the film is a towering achievement on its own - the multilingual voices waltzing around Saul, random gunshots and marching footsteps, the ambient wood sounds - everything is so perfectly mixed and edited that it never appears that the film was shot on location in a warehouse in Hungary.
Holocaust is a done-to-death genre in the world cinema and has lost its novelty and impact. But with Son of Saul, László Nemes has not only reinvented this important genre, but also the cinematic technique of fixed perspective. His film is a monumental success, particularly for not being exploitative in violence or being overtly sentimental - but achieving a fine balance of fiction and reality. Nemes remarks that Nazi camps were a killing factories, where output was the hundreds of dead corpses. Son of Saul underlines this fact with the boldest presentation, challenging and deeply disturbing us for existence of this black chapter of history and reminding us the crimes we have committed in the name of race, religion and greed.
4/5
