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Movies In The Spotlight: Son Of Saul

son-of-saul-poster-lgSon of Saul

This movie is a stunning, excoriating Holocaust drama. The experience of evil and the experience of being in hell are offered by this devastating and terrifying film by Laszlo Nemes, set in the AuschwitzBirkenau death camp in 1944 (P. Bradshaw, The Guardian, April 28 2016). Few fictional films have dared to be so authentic, so close to the actual horrors as seen, felt and committed by Saul, a Jewish inmate who is a member of the camp’s Sonderkommando (special commando) unit. As A. O. Scott relates “The Sonderkommando occupy an especially painful and contested place in the history of the Holocaust. Slave laborers like 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 up afterward, sorting through clothes, eyeglasses, jewelry and other personal effects and burning the corpses (New York Times, Dec. 17, 2015).

Saul witnesses the death 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. We become Saul, we see only what he sees; anything beyond his vision is blurred and muted. This technique somehow makes what is happening almost bearable. The viewer is the prisoner, the sensation of claustrophobia is compelling. We feel Saul’s enormous energy, his will to survive and his cunning. Not for the fainthearted and not for children, the movie is superb and must be seen (experienced). Our empathy is fully engaged, for Saul, for his fellow inmates and for those who die in the chaos.

This is Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes’ first film, in Hungarian with English subtitles. The movie is the 2016 Oscar winner for foreignlanguage films.

Reviewed by Dolores Luber

These movies are available free from the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library at the JCC.

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