Monday, December 28, 2015

Son of Saul

Writer/Director Lάzlό Nemes’ Son of Saul is a grim
portrait of man’s inhumanity to man, taking viewers into the inner workings of
a Polish death camp in 1944. 

Here, the most able-bodied Jews are forced to clean the gas
chambers, strip valuables from the clothes, burn the corpses and shovel the
ashes into the nearby river. Things you’d
never want to realize took place happen around Hungarian Jew Saul Ausländer (Gėza
Röhrig), as Cinematographer Mάtyάs Erdėly keeps his angular face in close-up. 

In an effort to have some degree of moral focus, Saul tries
to give a Jewish burial to a young boy, who, somehow, survived the gas chamber
only to be suffocated by a doctor. 

The problem is that Saul’s moral compass turns to obsession
as he claims the boy is his son and lets his delusion betray the living men,
who are attempting to escape the prison. 

The ultimate failure of Saul to help both the living and the
dead left me feeling sick, but perhaps that’s what Nemes intended. 

If you’re looking for entertainment, avoid Son
of Saul like the moral plague the Nazis created.  Still, as a powerful first effort, I give it a
4 out of 5. 

About Me

Brian Porzak: I am a cinephile who likes to view films with a live audience.  My taste runs the gamut, including indies, studio films, foreign films and most all genres.  Because I see so many films, friends often ask me what to see.  So, I thought I'd blog about what is worth seeing or not.  As a writer/filmmaker myself, I hope to give a more uplifting perspective than the typical critic.  Filmmaking is tremendously difficult.  Just because some problems might exist in a particular work does not, necessarily, destroy its enjoyability and I think that is necessary to point out to would-be viewers. 
See www.Aix-en-Film.com