By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Lázló Nemes
Starring: Balázs Farkas | Gergö Farkas | Géza Röhrig | Jerzy Walczak | Levente Molnár | Urs Rechn
Original language title: Saul Fia
Country: hungary
Year: 2016
Running time: 107
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3808342/
Brett says: “Not another holocaust film. SON OF SAUL is a look from within a World War II concentration camp, or perhaps better described as a series of passing glances from within. Director Lázló Nemes provides the insight into militant procedures relegated by S.S. officers to Jewish squad leaders who force some of these ‘lucky ones’ to lead others to the gas chambers and subsequent gas chamber clean-ups. If this sounds like a story you’ve heard before, the nature of the tight camera shots that never leave Saul (Géza Röhrig) is the tool the film relies upon to ensure a roomful of utter silence at whatever venue one chooses to view this work. A theatre full of collectively held breaths is the result for the 100-plus-minute duration.
“The camera follows Saul every step of the way, giving viewers an inside tutorial on the extermination process. It is as if we are constantly perched on the shoulder of actor Röhrig and we often see interactions with other camp personnel as abruptly and unrehearsed as it would have been. The realism is most essential, however, in taking the viewer through the central conflict.
“Following a gas chamber incident of the latest transport of prisoners, Saul proceeds to carry out the routine until a most unusual miracle seems to have taken place. This will be the moment of conflict that softly touches upon metaphors throughout the in-your-face nature of it all. The film wonderfully interchanges uses of soft focus and deep focus to keep the audience locked on what the director thrusts upon them.
“The film is one that moves at a walking pace throughout much of the runtime, but the collateral action and dialogue makes every step that Saul takes have a sense of urgency. The balance that director Lázló Nemes provides saves this from being a hard-to-follow handheld camera genre film. As much of an oxymoron as it might sound, it is evident that the film might best be described as frantically deliberate when the story is winding up and deliberately frantic when unraveling. 5 cats”
Kyle says: “Oh no, not another Holocaust film. With respect, I am compelled to dissent strongly from the laudatory review by Brett of SON OF SAUL, and I suggest that Chlotrudis members should see the film for themselves. In fact, this title created widespread divisiveness and harsh criticism immediately upon screening at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. Some disagreements can be found in initial reporting in the pages of ‘Film Comment’ by members of the NYFF Selection Committee, and currently in the decision by editor Gavin Smith to run ‘pro’ and ‘con’ reviews of the film, by Jonathan Romney and Stefan Grissemann respectively.
“The Holocaust defies the curtailment of narrative and diminishment of detail dictated by reality. Except by the most roundabout indirection, such as Chlotrudis award-winner IDA, there are no fictionalizations of the Holocaust that come anywhere close to the emotional and dramatic devastation of the great documentaries by Claude Lanzmann and Marcel Ophuls in capturing the horrific specificity of the unimaginable. I had looked forward with great interest to the idea of SON OF SAUL at the 53rd New York Film Festival; in the event it was the least interesting and involving of the 36 screenings I attended. I happened to be seated with two young Latino filmmakers, one of whom had recently received a career-commencing prize for a short film, and was somewhat shocked that they whispered through the film and seemed interested only in the director’s ostentatious camera technique.
“I was devastated by the first scene detailing the chaos and deception of gassing huge numbers of human beings, and by the final scene of a minor redemption. But the hour and a half between them contained not a single believable moment for me — worse, many minutes of monstrous mendacity. Saul is too healthy, has too much freedom, and is too little noticed by the Nazis, as are most of his comrades. In fact the piles of dead bodies all look well fed and exercised, and virtually no one in SON OF SAUL has the haunted look which is the first thing we notice in countless photographs and documentaries of actual Holocaust events. Here is the final paragraph of Stefan Grissemann’s article: ‘The Romanian writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once noted that “a novel about Auschwitz is either not a novel, or not about Auschwitz.” That conclusion is still completely valid: SON OF SAUL is a willfully obscene thriller, a well-made atrocity story capitalizing on the shock value of its topic. It is not about Auschwitz. 2 cats
“Tuesday, October 6, 2015, at the New York Film Festival, Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, New York”
Brett responds: “Thank for your review. I just wanted to add that the UNreality of it all did not fly past me. I can confirm Kyle’s mentions of the inaccuracies and heavy reliance on suspension of disbelief in the film; however, that–to me–was precisely the point of the film.
A stone-faced thoughtless and emotionless man stripped of all that is what we are greeted with. The obligatory in-your-face Hollywood style imagery and brutality we would’ve no doubt gotten in a Spielberg flick is the ‘prequel’ if you will. What we have in this film is the aftermath: a man who now dives into the last stage of blind hope in a situation that offers none. The camerawork takes us on a wild ride of technical skill, yes, but it is a form meets function piece in that we not only have the POV shots of a man, but also his now deranged perspective. The narrator is unreliable. One cannot trudge through the required moments of suspension of disbelief without first acknowledging this. The depictions and the actual way the story plays out can easily be perceived as inaccurate, not the presumption of reality of the film itself. The conflict at the heart of the film is not even real, I would contend. It is a fruitless effort conjured by a man who has seen and been an active part of too much. He was the object and the watched before this. Now, he becomes the watcher and the player.
“And even if you want to believe that the ‘miracle’ that generates the film’s primary conflict actually happens, it most certainly is not Saul’s son. It could have been any child and Saul would have ‘owned’ that moment. It is because he is in a situation where he has not really owned up to what it is that he is forced to do and has complied with in assembly-line-like fashion.
“I’ve tried to make a more concerted effort not to give everything away in my previous review, and in so doing, I have opened the door for it to look like I’m passing this off as a modern masterpiece of cinema verité. Quite the contrary, I think it is a fine mix of psychosis shot in POV reality. The journey of the film is as much a series of hallucinations and faulty hopes as anything. Smoke floods some scenes and blinding lights accompany others as if we are entering in and out of dream sequences, and all of it subtle. I never really considered the other approach where we are supposed to go along with everything as if it is actually happening. The absurdity of the situation is such that it has the reverse effect on me. I believe it to be a study in guilt, mental trauma, and empty hope more than a realistic depiction of one man’s romp through Nazi concentration camps. It is not a plot-driven film for me; the plot is secondary to what the man must have really been experiencing as a cog in the machine that has now broken so close to the end of the nightmare. This is precisely the reason I led with ‘Not another Holocaust film.’ I meant it tongue-in-cheek as a reference to how many of these films get made and how some rely on the same devices as the ones before it, as if I were dreading it. As it turns out, much like the film, the opener has a second way of looking at it.”