Reviews on the Music in Son of Saul
Review: 'Son of Saul' Revisits Life and Death in Auschwitz
- Son of Saul
- Directed by László Nemes
- Drama, War
- R
- 1h 47m
The shape of the screen is unusually narrow in "Son of Saul," the 38-year-old Hungarian filmmaker Laszlo Nemes's debut characteristic. Nigh square, it evokes an earlier era, when all movies looked this mode, and as well emphasizes the claustrophobia of the story and the setting. We are in a Nazi death campsite, and actually in it, to a caste that few fictional films have had the nerve to attempt. The camera doesn't only survey the billet and the guard towers, the haggard prisoners and brutal guards. It takes us to the very door of the gas chambers, in the close visitor of Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig), a Jewish inmate who is a member of the campsite'southward Sonderkommando (special commando) unit.
Here I should step back a bit, though Mr. Nemes, who favors a mitt-held, intimate, in-the-moment shooting style, decidedly does not. The Sonderkommando occupy an especially painful and contested place in the history of the Holocaust. Slave laborers similar nearly everyone else in the camps who was not immediately killed, they had the job of shepherding their fellow Jews to their deaths and cleaning upwardly later on, sorting through clothes, eyeglasses, jewelry and other personal effects and burning the corpses.
They were rewarded for this service with meager privileges that included improved rations and the postponement of their own inevitable deaths. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, where "Son of Saul" takes place, there was a Sonderkommando uprising in 1944, an event that is echoed in parts of the pic. After the war, members of the Sonderkommando were shunned by many other survivors considering they had, however involuntarily, participated in the slaughter. Some were executed or otherwise punished for collaborating with the Germans.
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Beefcake of a Scene | 'Son of Saul'
Laszlo Nemes narrates a sequence from "Son of Saul."
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This larger history is kept outside the frame. Shot by and large in extended close-ups (the skilled director of photography is Matyas Erdely), "Son of Saul" moves rapidly and relentlessly in the nowadays tense, never leaving Saul's side. Not that we penetrate his thoughts. Mr. Rohrig, a poet and erstwhile teacher appearing in his first picture, has the intriguing opacity that distinguishes nonprofessional actors. Like Lamberto Maggiorani in "Bicycle Thieves" or Maria Falconetti in "The Passion of Joan of Arc," he is an indelibly particular, well-nigh spiritually intense, screen presence. His face is difficult to read and incommunicable to forget — a mask of stoicism, anguish, exhaustion and cunning.
Our eyes are trained on Saul, and therefore we don't run into much of what he sees. Mr. Nemes uses shallow focus techniques that blur everything not immediately in front of his protagonist's face up. Though nosotros find ourselves in shut proximity to death, nosotros are likewise detached from it. Human being figures are blurred, movements are indistinct, and horrifying sounds — cries, gasps, footsteps, blows — reach us from invisible sources.
This disorientation is meant to convey immediacy, and to signal an uncompromising vision. Mr. Nemes wants to serve the horror raw, to bring the states as shut every bit he mayhap can to the machinery of murder, to brand cruelty palpable. He subscribes to 1 of the dubious dogmas of postal service-World State of war II aesthetics, namely the idea that the representation of real-life atrocity requires the chastening of artifice, the stripping away of anything that might smack too much of style.
But of course, everything I have said nearly this motion-picture show so far has to practice with its formal strategies and visual tactics. To say that "Son of Saul" is a highly stylized, cocky-conscious and calculating piece of narrative is not to say that it'southward a bad movie, only that it's a picture. And to say it'due south a Holocaust movie is not and then much to identify its discipline matter as to specify its genre. Mr. Nemes may disdain "Schindler's List" — equally every ambitious European art-movie manager must — simply he is very much in its debt.
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Movie Review: 'Son of Saul'
The Times critic A.O. Scott reviews "Son of Saul."
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In the immediate aftermath of Globe War 2, the mass murder of the Jews seemed to many artists and intellectuals to exist beyond the reach of representation. It was something to be handled with the utmost intendance and gravity. But fine art, especially pop art, abhors a vacuum, and the Shoah is, amidst other things, a rich reservoir of stories, true and speculative. In that location are works of narrative — like Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah" or the novels of Patrick Modiano — that try to measure the gulf between past and present and to document the inadequacy of memory. There are others that try to bridge that gap by recreating or retrieving a sense of what actually happened. "Schindler's List" remains the best-known — and one of the best examples. And in that location are some that attempt to make full the void with fable and fantasy, like "Inglourious Basterds" and "Life Is Beautiful."
"Son of Saul" belongs more in the tertiary category than the second. It's a shell-the-clock thriller wrapped around an allegory. Saul witnesses the expiry of a boy who may or may not be his son, and becomes obsessed with giving the body a proper Jewish burial. He scrambles through the camp, a buzzing hive of hideous and mundane routines, in search of a rabbi. He barters and begs, and his quixotic projection intersects with desperate plans for rebellion and escape that other prisoners are hatching. Mr. Nemes orchestrates a tour de force of suspense, a swift symphony of collisions, coincidences and reversals that is almost unbearably heady.
His skill is undeniable, simply too troubling. The movie offers less insight than sensation, an emotional experience that sits besides comfortably within the norms of entertainment. This is not entirely the director's fault. The Holocaust, once forbidden territory, is at present safety and familiar ground.
"Son of Saul" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Expiry everywhere. The film is in Hungarian, German, Yiddish and Smooth with English subtitles. Running fourth dimension: ane hour 47 minutes.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/movies/review-son-of-saul-revisits-life-and-death-in-auschwitz.html
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