'Son of Saul' makes the human cost of Nazis the focus

Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes' hard-hitting, gripping, gimmick drama - and it is a marvelously effective gimmick - uses a single 40 mm. lens to focus exclusively on the face and upper body of Saul Ausländer, a member of the Sonderkommando, a group of Jewish prisoners forced to help the Nazis carry out mass exterminations in concentration camps.

We can only see and hear exactly what Saul sees and hears as he navigates through the death camp, seeking a rabbi to help him properly bury the body of a young boy he thinks might be his son. As he searches, we barely glimpse his slightly out-of-focus surroundings, but we clearly hear the noise generated by gunfire, shouting Nazis and vehicles passing in the distance.

Saul is played by Géza Röhrig, a Hungarian writer and poet now in New York. His performance is raw, feral and unlike anything you've seen in a Hollywood trained actor.

His face, haunted and vacant, becomes the filter through which we experience - and it's an immersive experience unparalleled by other Holocaust dramas - a hellish place painted in hopelessness and despair, a Netherworld of depravity and depravation that refuses to venture into horror, but creates its own soulless vacuum of humanity.

"Son of Saul" doesn't rely on conventional plotting. It does offer an attempted camp rebellion - based on the only armed revolt in the history of Auschwitz - but Matyas Erdely's 35 mm. celluloid camera keeps Röhrig's tortured countenance at the center of this color-bled universe, a cold and inhospitable environment where one man jeopardizes his life for a shard of something righteous, a single noble act in a dark age of evil rendered palpably real by being sketched in the theater of the mind.

(Film note: The only other movie I remember being shot with a single fixed lens would be Wes Anderson's 1996 "Bottle Rocket," photographed with a 27 mm. wide angle lens to put his audiences "closer to the action.")

<h3 class="briefhead">Nemes: Film, no digital</h3>

László Nemes, the 38-year-old Hungarian film writer/director whose first movie "Son of Saul" won the Grand Prix at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and is a nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, came to Chicago last month to talk about it.

Q. I noticed in the production notes that you refer to the Jews in the camp being "assassinated," as opposed to executed or exterminated. I've not seen that word used in this context before.

A. Actually, I think that might be a poor choice of words. "Murdered" would have been more appropriate.

Q. I thought "assassinated" was perfect because of its political undertones.

A. Of course! That's interesting. How can you separate it from a political project? It is a political and economic project. You're right, I guess.

Q. Were you ever tempted to go beyond Saul's view to make the storytelling easier?

A. Oh, no. We never had that temptation. We wanted to tell the story from his point of view. If it's one person's experience, one person's point of view, you can communicate something visceral. Otherwise, you start making concessions.

I think in art, in general, that obstacles are good. Obstacles can create values because we have to operate within a framework of rules. That's something that creates richness.

Q. Sticking to Saul's view I thought would distance the horror of events around him. The opposite happened, at least to me. Did you expect this reaction from audiences while filming?

A. When we were making this film we didn't know what it would be like at the end. It was a prototype. We couldn't foresee what the outcome would be.

My intuition was that being with the main character was the human reference to everything going on in the background. The film affects audiences around the world in a very visceral way.

Q. I noticed that you shot this movie on 35 mm. film stock so it would possess a degree of "instability." What did you mean by that, and why couldn't you obtain the same effect from a digital camera?

A. Digital movies are based on pixels. Film is based on something physical. It is made up of grains that are moving from one image to the next. This creates a very organic feeling. It's alive. You cannot control it.

It's not a dead pixel. It's a living grain. That's what I refer to when I call it a living texture. In this film, it's very important, because digital tends to flatten the image, but film creates more contrast inside the grain structure.

Q. An excellent defense for the use of film.

A. We're fighting for it. People should be able to experience for their money not the television, but something that's much more like film projection.

“Son of Saul”

★ ★ ★ ★

Opens at the Music Box Theatre, Chicago, the Evanston Century 18 and the Highland Park Renaissance Place. In Hungarian, Yiddish, German, Russian and Polish with subtitles. Rated R for graphic nudity, violence. 104 minutes.