At one point, Saul runs interference for a fellow sonderkommando who is surreptitiously filming the events at the camp with a contraband film camera-an act of documentation rooted in historical fact (the footage smuggled out of concentration camps helped to get America involved in World War II) and yet presented self-reflexively, as a commentary on Nemes’s own practice. I’m willing to give Nemes the benefit of the doubt here, and Son of Saul doesn’t lack for moments that suggest its maker is interested in the politics of perception. He’s lost the ability to see anybody other than himself as a human being. The character’s willingness to not only endanger himself, but many, many others in the search for a rabbi suggests that, whatever the validity of his quest, he’s undertaking it with blinders on-in which case the distressed visibility of the action around him has an insidiously figurative quality. There is an intriguing ambiguity here, as the dialogue and acting points toward the possibility that Saul is either mistaken (the boy is not his son) or mad (he has no son) or else knowingly self-deluding (the funeral rites will be entirely symbolic or cathartic). (One way to see this set-up is as Life Is Beautiful in reverse). As the film goes along, we come to understand that he thinks this slender, physically indistinct child is his son.
#Son of saul review movie
Considering the meticulousness that it takes to make a movie look this way, mightn’t we wonder if the blurriness of the backgrounds in this film isn’t exactly the point? The plot of Son of Saul develops out of its namesake’s desire-or more accurately, his obsessive-compulsion-locate a rabbi amongst the inmates to provide funeral rites for a young boy whose body he extracts from the pile of corpses outside the gas chamber.
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“These filmmaking choices,” writes Dargis, “transform all the screaming, weeping condemned men, women and children into anonymous background blurs.” This observation is at once incontestable and a bit slippery. Things that would be clearly visible to Saul appear to us as indistinct shapes strewn throughout the frame. But it also manipulates the point of view in another way. We’re inches away from a kind of video-game, first-person subjectivity, but the slight distance Nemes maintains from the character allows us to see him as a protagonist, rather than a surrogate. In the prologue, Saul is on clean-up duty outside the gas chambers, and so we’re right there with him because he remains on the right side of the iron door that closes behind the prisoners who’ve been herded inside naked, we stay there too, watching him listen to the screams that bleed through the metal. That authorial sweet spot is, always, proximate to Saul, whose movements through the camp-in and out of its different compounds and corners-double as the engine of the film’s narrative drive. By the time the initial, wavering image stabilizes on the hard features of Géza Röhrig as Saul Auslander-a sonderkommando (Jewish concentration prisoners forced to work in the death chambers) in Auschwitz circa 1944-it’s clear that the director has us right where he wants us. Like nobody less than the Dardenne brothers, Nemes demonstrates a facility for blocking and camera moves that activate screen space rather than simply describing it. Opening on a deceptively verdant blur of green that is quickly blotted out by human bodies in greyed-out concentration camp regalia, Son of Saul challenges and mesmerizes the viewer’s attention for its duration. “Intellectually repellent,” was the verdict of the latter, whose New York Times Cannes dispatch took pains to give credit where it was due for the film’s “meticulously lighted, composed and shot” mise-en-scène -a description which, it must be said, is entirely accurate.
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The skeptical notes have been sounded by major critics like Dennis Lim and Manohla Dargis, who see in Son of Saul a flexing of cinematic muscle unbecoming of a film about the Holocaust. But while many are eager to christen his maiden voyage a masterpiece, there is something to the cries of dissent from the other side. Here, it would seem, is a born filmmaker. He traveled to New York from his native Hungary to study and perfect his craft he apprenticed with long-take maestro Béla Tarr his feature debut is a hugely accomplished and evidently uncompromised piece of work.
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So what of Son of Saul? Feted with a Grand Prix at Cannes by a jury that knows from prodigies-members Joel Coen and Xavier Dolan having each already dominated the Croisette at ages where most directors are paying their dues-38-year-old László Nemes checks all the wunderkind boxes. László Nemes, Hungary, Sony Pictures Classicsīrilliance in filmmaking is so rare that it ought not to be underrated.