SON OF SAUL
Not another Breaking Bad spin-off, but a stunning debut.
Citizen Kane. The Maltese Falcon. The 400 Blows. Eraserhead. Reservoir Dogs. Any serious discussion of the greatest film debuts of all time must now include Hungarian Holocaust drama Son Of Saul. By the time you read this, director László Nemes will surely have added the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar to his roster of awards since his film premiered in the main competition at Cannes – unheard of for a debut.
“I wanted to go back to the here and now of the extermination, with a point of view from within, to give a sense of what the human being had to endure in such circumstances,” explains Nemes, staring at the pencil he’s worrying between his fingers and stealing the odd upwards glance. “Films usually have an intellectual approach to the Holocaust instead of a visceral approach. They are not the point of view of the victims; they are the point of view of those who are perpetrating, or they jump point of views, or present a god-like point of view. This is problematic because it tries to encompass and describe. You cannot, as a human, understand.”
Nemes’ answer is to follow one man, Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig), as he goes about his daily chores at Auschwitz-Birkenau in October of 1944. A Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners who were forced to aid the Nazis in the mechanics of extermination before themselves being executed and replaced every few months, he’s part of the business of genocide: unloading trains, loading gas chambers, burning bodies, shovelling ash. And while a story hook is introduced when Saul thinks he spies the corpse of his son in a crematorium and determines to bury the body, the film refuses to deal in anything so tawdry as suspense or thrills or heroics.
“This is a factory,” Nemes states. “Even if it’s a factory of death, it’s built by man. So I wanted to have this sense of everyday life, even in hell.” With the camera never leaving Saul’s granite face and DOP Mátyás Erdély employing shallow focus within a square 1:37:1 frame, viewers are afforded only glimpses of the horrors. A sickening sense of disorientation is amplified by long, reeling takes and cacophonous sound design: barking dogs, shouted commands, roaring fires.
“If you shoot too much and tell too much you only reduce the scope of it,” says Nemes, who trained as assistant director to the great Hungarian director Béla Tarr. “If you use imagination as an intermediary, then through suggestion you can create an intuition of the enormity, of the boundless suffering.”
The extraordinary result is harrowing in the extreme – which is exactly as it should be. JG
ETA | 29 APRIL Son Of Saul opens next month.
‘I wanted to have a sense of everyday life, even in hell’