Video review: "Son of Saul"

A deserved winner of the Academy Award for best foreign language film, “Son of Saul” takes a very innovative approach in telling a familiar and heartbreaking tale.

This Holocaust drama from Hungary looks at the Sonderkommando – Jews kept alive and granted a sort of immunity to shepherd their fellows into the gas chambers, and then load the bodies into the crematorium or earthen pit. Their reprieve is temporary, though, as the Nazi regime makes sure to cycle them out every few months to eliminate evidence of their crimes against nature.

They are ferrymen on the river of death, destined to become passengers themselves.

Saul (Géza Röhrig) is quiet and grim, known for blending into the background and keeping his head down. But one day he observes a boy who somehow survived the deadly gas, who is then coldly suffocated by a German doctor. Saul claims him as his own son, and becomes determined to see the lad given a proper Jewish burial, with a reading of Kaddish by a rabbi.

Is this really his child? It seems more like delusion. But Saul’s obsession is less about preserving the boy’s dignity than reclaiming some measure of his own humanity. He sneaks through the camp, putting his own life at risk and those of other Jews, trying to find a rabbi and get the body out.

Meanwhile, the Sonderkommando leader is organizing a rebellion and escape, and Saul is lured into the plot. He agrees, but only since it grants him some freedom of movement to pursue his own goal.

Director László Nemes, in his directorial debut, uses a roving camera with a shallow depth of focus to keep our perspective in line with Saul’s. Here’s a man who has spent the last months of his life never looking past the 10 feet in front of him, in order to keep the greater terror obscured.

We see things in the background of the frame, somehow made more disturbing by remaining indistinct. Nemes lets our imaginations bring our own clarity to the fuzziness.

Here is a story of horror, from which we cannot – and should not – avert our gaze.

Bonus features are limited in scope but of great depth.

They’re centered around a feature-length commentary track in which Nemes, Röhrig and cinematographer Mátyás Erdély all participate. I always feel the best commentaries are those that combine multiple levels of the creative process. The triad of filmmaker, performer and visualist are what make this movie great.

There is also a Q&A from an appearance at the Museum of Tolerance, and a deleted scene.

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Review: "Son of Saul"

Just when you think the story of the Holocaust has been covered from every perspective, every angle, every storytelling form possible, along comes a film like “Son of Saul” to remind us that great tragedies never really end – their human echoes continue to reverberate and disturb.

“Saul” uses many of the same techniques as last year’s Oscar-winning “Birdman,” and indeed this film has been nominated for its own Academy Award as the foreign language entry from Hungary. The camera floats around the main character, a Sonderkommando working in the crematorium of Auschwitz circa 1944, in long languid takes.

A Jew kept alive to dispose of the bodies of other Jews, Saul has some measure of authority and protection from the German guards. But their own time is coming, as the head Sonderkommando learns they are about to be replaced and disposed of, so their memories can die with them. They quietly begin planning an uprising, stashing weapons and so on.

Director László Nemes, who co-wrote the screenplay with Clara Royer based on years of research and testimony by the actual concentration camp workers, keeps things unnervingly in our face. Most of the footage is close-ups of the main actor, with a purposefully short focal plane so everything a few feet past him is blurry.

This shallow focus is the breathtaking counterpoint to Gregg Toland’s use of deep focus in “Citizen Kane.” It’s a pioneering new way of looking at things that also serves a key narrative purpose: keeping us inside the tunnel vision of Saul, who sees what he needs to and blocks out what horrors he can.

Until, that is, Saul witnesses something he cannot ignore.

A young Jewish boy survives the gassing, and the German doctor is brought over to examine the medical marvel. After contemptuously ending the lad’s miracle with his own hands, the physician orders an autopsy. Witnessing this, Saul decides to intervene, claiming the boy as his own son, and determining to give him a proper Jewish burial – with the reading of Kaddish by an actual rabbi.

Is the boy really Saul’s own flesh and blood? It seems quite unlikely. When Saul shares his plans, his fellows remind him he has no son.

But Saul, heretofore known as a ghostlike presence who goes along to survive, has clearly made an irrevocable choice. Géza Röhrig, with his hard angled face and deep penetrating eyes, is a revelation in the role. His mission may not make any kind of cognitive sense, but it’s the journey of a restless spirit with but one purpose left in life.

Saul wanders around the camp, trying to find a rabbi, asking questions, sneaking into places he shouldn’t go, sticking his neck out, endangering the rebellion. One man dies as a direct result of his actions. But Saul does not waver. As the time of crisis grows closer, here is one man madly risking his life for a small, meaninglessly act of decency.

Is it worth it? Is he right, or terribly wrong? Does it matter?

“Son of Saul” is an unspeakably powerful film not about striving for life but facing a death that is inevitable. Saul chooses the path of his own unmaking, and in doing so finds grace amidst the ravages of hatred and mass murder.

Astonishingly, this is the debut feature film of László Nemes and, I hope, the first of many.