Son of Saul
Saul fia
László Nemes (2015)
Son of Saul will be released in the UK on 29 April. I went to a pre-release screening, at Curzon Richmond, preceded by László Nemes’s first film, the 2007 short With a Little Patience. The Hungarian title of this fourteen-minute piece is Türelem (‘Patience’); the expansion in the English translation of the title reinforces a link to The Waste Land. In an interview with Filmmaker last year[1], Nemes spoke of his admiration for T S Eliot. He uses lines from ‘The Burial of the Dead’, the first part of The Waste Land, as an epigraph for With a Little Patience:
‘… I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Öd’ und leer das Meer.’
The phrase ‘with a little patience’ occurs in ‘What the Thunder Said’, the fifth and last part of the poem:
‘He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience’
In the opening shot of With a Little Patience, a blurred figure approaches the camera and comes into focus, against a background of woodland. The figure is a young woman, who holds something in her hand. A male figure momentarily blocks out the image of her. He then moves aside. In most of what follows, the face and upper body of the young woman (Éva Kelényi) are the centre of the film. She goes into her nearby place of work and László Nemes observes minutely her preparations for, and setting to, some kind of office routine, although we never see down to the level of the desk at which she sits. There’s no dialogue as such. There are sounds of telephones and typewriters, music on the radio, and the quiet hum of conversation elsewhere in the workplace. At one point, a man bends over and issues some kind of instruction to the young clerk – she gets out a document and takes it over to him. The object we were conscious of her holding at the start is revealed to be a brooch, which is now in the breast pocket of her blouse. At one point, she takes the brooch out and places it at her throat, seeming to look at herself in a mirror. She then replaces the brooch in her blouse pocket. She also keeps looking at a postcard.
Eventually, she goes to the window, which looks out on the same woodland seen at the start. Three people – a distressed woman and two men who seem to be trying to calm her – come into view. The men’s clothes suggest they are Jews. A figure in a striped jacket hustles this trio off in the direction of what the camera now reveals as a large group of people, some of them naked. They are being rounded up by soldiers and a few other men in striped jackets. An officer in SS uniform walks across the frame and glances in the direction of the young woman, from whose point of view we continue to watch the scene. We see her hands fasten the window. The last shot is of the woodland, with no one now visible or audible, through the window bars. The closing credits begin with a dedication, ‘To the irredeemable loss of the Freilich family’. The elegiac music that plays over the credits is the same music that was heard in snatches during the office sequence.
With a Little Patience is compelling but difficult to understand. Although Éva Kelényi has an apparently open face, it’s hard to read. We can’t be sure whether the evidence of the film that her character could not speak and that her eyes failed indicates callousness or powerlessness in the face of what she sees from the office window. This short film also prefigures in several ways Son of Saul, which is Nemes’s first feature. The protagonist, Saul Ausländer, comes from a blur into focus in the opening shots and rarely leaves our sight over the next 107 minutes. A large part of the film the audience sees is shown from his point of view. The year is 1944. Saul is a Hungarian-Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz, where he is one of the Sonderkommandos – prisoners who were forced by the Nazis to take responsibility for the disposal of the corpses of their fellow prisoners, murdered in the gas chambers. Although they’re not striped, the Sonderkommando jackets bear a special mark and thus connect to the tops worn by the prisoners assisting their captors in With a Little Patience. Son of Saul takes place, if not in real time, in a compressed timeframe – the last day and a half of Saul’s life. The brooch in With a Little Patience was literally something for Éva Kelényi’s character to hold onto; the same could be said, in a metaphorical sense, of the obsession that takes over Saul.
In the first few minutes of the film, prisoners are herded into the showers at Auschwitz, having been told there’ll be soup for them once they’ve showered. After the prisoners have been gassed, Saul and the other Sonderkommandos get on with their usual clearing up duties but one of the prisoners, a boy, is still breathing, though unconscious. In spite of Saul’s protests to the doctor in charge, a lethal injection is given to the boy. Saul immediately becomes preoccupied with the need for him to receive Jewish funeral rites and to find a rabbi to deliver the rites. Saul also tells people that the dead boy is his son. The ambiguousness that characterised With a Little Patience takes two main forms in Son of Saul. First, is what Saul is doing morally right, or is he prioritising the dead over the living – an accusation made by another prisoner, one of a group planning a breakout from the camp?[2] Second, is the dead boy really Saul’s son? He’s told repeatedly by others that he has no son.
Son of Saul may be more effective thanks to neither of these questions being definitely answered. László Nemes leaves it to the audience to reach their own conclusions. As I read the film, Saul wasn’t the boy’s biological father but his disturbed state of mind caused him to believe that he was. I understood Saul to be impelled by an imperative to see that the boy’s death was properly handled – and that this reflected a realisation that, in a regime governed by death, this is the best you can aim for. The style of the film enables you to glimpse – no more than that – the magnitude of the horror of Auschwitz. When they’re following Saul, Nemes and his cinematographer Mátyás Erdély (who also shot With a Little Patience) track with a hand-held camera and the effect is naturally disorienting. The sound design conveys the chaos of the camp – but chaos in the sense of moral derangement rather than administrative disorder. The place runs efficiently; the relentless activity in evidence on the screen suggests a factory. The combination of the movie’s visual and aural aspects is attention-grabbing and attention-holding. As you watch, you’re always aware of the technique being used – and that it’s being used on you – but you’re nonetheless gripped by what you see and hear: Nemes conveys the futility, the confusion and the intensity of Saul’s increasingly irrational quest. The shallow depth of focus that he and Erdély favour allows them to strike an admirably discreet balance in what they show of the atrocities taking place so that the film seems neither voyeuristic nor evasive. By distancing as well as shocking, Nemes reminds his audience how far we are from fully ‘experiencing’ Auschwitz. The mixture of euphemism and dehumanising slang in the vocabulary of the place also continues to startle: ‘Sonderkommando’ means ‘special unit’; ‘stuff’ refers to prisoners newly killed or who are about to be killed.
According to Wikipedia, László Nemes, who’s now thirty-nine, conceived Son of Saul ‘from the book The Scrolls of Auschwitz, a collection of testimonies by Sonderkommando members … after discovering it during the production of Béla Tarr’s The Man from London in 2005 when he was working as Tarr’s assistant’. This source material presumably helped Nemes and Clara Royer, with whom he wrote the screenplay, to recreate the world of the concentration camp but didn’t provide the central story of Saul Ausländer. (That name is charged with moral connotations, even if they don’t all seem to apply to Nemes’s protagonist: in the Old Testament, King Saul lost God’s favour; in the New Testament, Saul is what Paul is called before his conversion to Christianity; ausländer is German for foreigner.) Géza Röhrig, who plays Saul, was born and educated in Hungary but has lived in New York, in the Bronx, since 2000. A teacher and a published poet, he hadn’t acted since the late 1980s. Röhrig succeeds, memorably, in creating a man who is saturated by Auschwitz yet stands out from it. The actor is forty-eight but his character here is remarkably ageless. Saul’s salient quality isn’t simply the result of his often sharing the audience’s point of view of his environment: it also comes from how strongly and naturally Géza Röhrig suggests an unhinged mind – suggests, in other words, someone who ‘isn’t all there’. Compared with Röhrig, some of the actors in smaller roles, particularly those playing leaders of the planned escape, seem conventionally dynamic. The best supporting performance comes from Sándor Zsótér, as the doctor who ends the life of the ‘son’ but gives Saul the chance to arrange for a proper burial. Zsótér’s skilful underplaying leads us to suppose at first that the coldly matter-of-fact doctor is a Nazi: there’s strong impact in the revelation that he too is a prisoner in the camp. Éva Kelényi appears briefly as a woman who may or may not be Saul’s wife.
In a piece in the March-April 2016 issue of the Curzon magazine, Hannah McGill writes that:
‘Clear-eyed assessment of any film set against the backdrop of the Holocaust is a challenge: the context provokes a kind of emotional overload which can short-circuit critical judgment. For some viewers, the result is an anxious need to overpraise: to fling awards and superlatives at fictional representations in order to display sympathy for the real victims. For others, any and all such fictions are morally suspect – guilty of diminishing their context by lending it the contained, cathartic unpleasantness of a fireside ghost story.’
McGill’s own comments on Son of Saul rise to the challenge she mentions: her piece is, characteristically, a ‘clear-eyed assessment’. And the actual reception of Nemes’s film illustrates well enough the dichotomised responses to Holocaust drama that she identifies. Son of Saul took the Grand Prix at Cannes last year and has since won a clutch of awards, culminating in this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. While most English-language critics have praised the movie, one of the best of them, David Edelstein, is a notable dissenter. In his New York magazine review[3], Edelstein is particularly infuriated by what he calls Nemes’s ‘big cheat of an ending’. He goes on to describe this as follows:
‘Saul gets swept up in an escape attempt that takes him across a river, where he loses that precious body [of the boy] in the current, and into a forest cabin where his fellow fugitives plan their next moves. Suddenly, a small Polish boy wanders by, sees them, and runs away — but what Saul perceives is that his son is alive after all. He dies radiant, that madness turning out to be the tenderest mercy of all.
This is, bluntly, crap, and if the finale weren’t so shocking — everyone dies off-screen in a barrage of Nazi gunfire — I think the audience would see it more clearly for the cheap trick it is …’
The ending is problematic but I think the viewer’s awareness of this makes a difference – and that László Nemes is aware of this potential awareness. When Saul sees the Polish boy, the smile that spreads slowly across Géza Röhrig’s face is beautiful. It’s Saul’s only smile in the whole film. It gives him the quality of a holy fool. Yet the smile’s uniqueness makes it suspicious. I was much relieved by the smile and, at the same time, felt it was an admission of shared weakness – that Nemes needed to wring a kind of happy ending out of the material and that I needed him to do so. This doesn’t mean the film’s climax is crap. It’s something richer, thanks to the paradoxical duality of Saul – a man not in his right mind who has tried to act right-mindedly. He’s deluded in seeing his son. He may not be deluded in feeling vindicated.
27 March 2016
[1] http://tinyurl.com/gu35v35
[2] This brings to mind other lines of Eliot, from ‘Little Gidding’, the last of the Four Quartets:
‘Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?’
[3] http://www.vulture.com/2016/01/movie-review-son-of-saul.html#