Son of Saul (Saul fia)

Director: László Nemes
Screenplay: László Nemes & Clara Royer
Stars: Géza Röhrig (Saul Ausländer), Levente Molnár (Abraham Warszawski), Urs Rechn (Oberkapo Biederman), Todd Charmont (Bearded Prisoner), Jerzy Walczak (Rabbi Frankel), Gergö Farkas (Saul’s Son), Balázs Farkas (Saul’s Son), Sándor Zsótér (Dr. Miklos Nyiszli), Marcin Czarnik (Feigenbaum), Levente Orbán (Russian Prisoner), Kamil Dobrowolski (Mietek), Uwe Lauer (Oberscharführer Voss), Christian Harting (Oberscharführer Busch)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2015
Country: Hungary
Son of Saul Blu-Ray
Son of SaulHow to depict the Holocaust? Newsreel footage and photographs of liberated concentration camps bore witness to the aftermath, but there were virtually no images (and certainly no film footage) of what had actually transpired within the walls of the extermination camps. Filmmakers have been grappling ever since with the question of how to depict those horrors without inadvertently diminishing them via the inescapable use of artifice, which has resulted in films as disparate as Alain Resnais’s short documentary Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1955) and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). The difficulty imposed by the emotional, physical, and spiritual enormity of the subject matter is why Claude Lanzmann, in his influential documentary Shoah (1985), refused to employ even documentary evidence such as film footage and photographs, instead relying entirely on present-day interviews and footage of the locations where the murders took place. As he put it, the Holocaust is “unique in that it erects a ring of fire around itself, a borderline that cannot be crossed because there is a certain ultimate degree of horror that cannot be transmitted. To claim it is possible to do so is to be guilty of the most serious transgression.”

Lanzmann has apparently relaxed that stance in his embrace of László Nemes’s remarkable and unsettling drama Son of Saul (Saul fia), which won both the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, only the second Hungarian film to win that honor. The story takes place entirely in and around Auschwitz II-Birkenau over a day and a half as Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig), one of the Sonderkommandos (mostly Jewish prisoners who were given a few more months of life for their labor disposing of victims’ bodies and sorting their belongings) seeks desperately to give an adolescent boy a proper Jewish burial. Lanzmann, whose earlier comment was in direct response to Schindler’s List, the closest cinema has to a master narrative about the Holocaust, recognized that Nemes’s film seeks to do something very different by filtering that “ultimate degree of horror” through an insistent, very nearly exhausting, focus on Saul’s perspective. Lanzmann’s approval of the film (he called it “the anti-Schindler’s List) likely stems from the fact that Nemes adopted a purposeful strategy of limited representation, similar to Lanzmann’s own approach in Shoah.

Although Son of Saul takes place against the historic backdrop of a failed revolt by the Auschwitz Sonderkommandos on October 7, 1944, the film is not about the Holocaust itself. Rather, the film is about Saul’s mission, and Nemes, who is making his feature debut here, limits us our perceptional experience to what Saul sees and hears. The long, handheld takes by cinematographer Mátyás Erdély are almost always looking directly into Saul’s face or following closely over his should as he moves through the camp (Nemes is a protégé of Bela Tarr, but the style he uses here is most reminiscent of the films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, particularly 1999’s Rosetta). The film was shot in the squarish 1.37:1 Academy aspect ratio, which limits peripheral vision, and Erdély used a 40mm lens, which creates an incredibly shallow depth of field, thus allowing only what is in the immediate foreground to be in sharp focus. Thus, for long portions of the film we are peering over Saul’s shoulder while atrocity surrounds him, but always in a fuzzy, indistinct blur that is just enough to convey what is happening, but not enough to glean any details. It’s a brilliant strategy for representing what is, in some people’s mind, unrepresentable, and it creates an anxious, queasy viewing experience (the sound mix by Tamás Zányi adds to the effect immensely, as it immerses us in sonic horrors that often stand in for what we cannot see).

While some have argued that the film’s shallow focus aesthetic represents Saul’s literal perception of his experiences, the visual field is more metaphorical than literal. After all, everything Saul sees would have been in focus, so the out-of-focus events around him suggest his conscious, willful attempt to ignore them or look past them. His determination to bury the boy’s body according to Jewish ritual, which requires that he find a rabbi to perform a burial ceremony, becomes his sole drive, to the extent that he risks his own life and derailing the Sonderkommando revolt, which has been months in the planning. There is an uneasy ambiguity regarding this drive, as Saul’s insistence on burying the boy can be seen as either a heroic plight to do one decent thing in a maelstrom of human evil or a misguided, selfish, ultimately pointless endeavor that puts others needlessly at risk. The screenplay, which was written by Nemes and Clara Royer, refuses to give us a clear indication of whether Saul is a hero or a fool; Géza Röhrig’s superb performance is intense and draws us right into his experience from the first moment, which helps us empathize with Saul even when his plight begins to feel like the Theater of the Absurd, while all around him characters remind us that there are bigger issues at hand (one character accuses him of sacrificing the living for the dead).

That level of ambiguity makes Son of Saul a powerful experience because it forces us to grapple with the fundamental morality of Saul’s determination and the notion that anything good could possibly exist within the hell of genocide. At the same time, though, the film offers an additional layer of ambiguity that is not productive, but rather distracting. This involves the identity of the boy Saul is so determined to bury. As the title of the film implies, there is a strong suggestion that the boy is Saul’s biological son, and Saul even says as much on multiple occasions, even though he is regularly met with disbelief from other characters who know him and tell him he has no son. At one point Saul says that the boy is not from his wife, suggesting that it is his illegitimate child, but nothing else is offered in support. Saul’s reactions to the boy’s death (he survives a mass gassing and is killed by a Nazi doctor on a table after he is brought out) is understandably muted, as he is working within an extermination camp and must maintain a low profile, so it is hard to read his emotional state at any time. Thus, the boy is either his flesh-and-blood son or else he is just a boy whose particularly tragic death strikes Saul in such a way that he becomes determined to do something right for him. Either option is dramatically effective, but by leaving it ambiguous, the film drains some of the dramatic power that otherwise might have propelled it into the realm of an unqualified masterpiece.

Son of Saul Blu-Ray + Digital HD

Aspect Ratio1.37:1
AudioHungarian DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround
Subtitles English, French, Portuguese, Spanish
Supplements
  • Audio commentary by director László Nemes, actor Géza Röhrig, and cinematographer Mátyás Erdély
  • Museum of Tolerance Q&A with Nemes, Röhrig, and Erdély
  • Deleted scene
  • Trailer
  • DistributorSony Pictures Home Entertainment
    SRP$34.99
    Release DateApril 26, 2016

    VIDEO & AUDIO
    Unlike so many films today, Son of Saul was actually shot on film using handheld cameras, and it shows in the magnificent image on Sony’s Blu-ray. The 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer, presented in the original 1.37:1 aspect ratio, maintains the film’s celluloid appearance with a healthy presence of grain that gives it real physicality. Because of the film’s shallow-focus aesthetic, a lot of the image is purposefully blurry, rendering detail moot, but the parts that are in focus are sharp and clear. The color palette is subdued, with a predominance of earth tones—browns, grays, beiges, etc. There are a few striking instances of primary colors, though, including the huge red X on the back of Saul’s jacket. Arguably even better than the image quality is the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1-channel soundtrack, which is a master class in sonic layering and depth. Tamás Zányi’s chaotic sonic mix is impressively rendered, creating a fully immersive environment of chaos that makes the off-screen and out-of-focus visual horrors feel that much more real. The surround channels are regularly active in this regard, although the film’s quieter moments are just as well done.
    SUPPLEMENTS
    Given the film’s power and widespread critical acclaim, I was pleased to see quite a few supplements to help contextualize its achievements. There is a feature-length audio commentary in which director László Nemes, actor Géza Röhrig, and cinematographer Mátyás Erdély discuss the film in detail (all in perfect English, as well), giving us an engaging window into the project’s lengthy development, unique aesthetic approach, and international impact. Nemes, Röhrig, and Erdély also appear in an hour-long Q&A session following a screening of the film at the Museum of Tolerance. There is a lot of overlap between the commentary and the Q&A, of course, but each offers insight and information that the other does not. Also on the disc is a very brief deleted scene (running just over two minutes) and a trailer.

    Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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    All images copyright © Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

    Overall Rating: (3.5)




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