‘Son of Saul’ immerses us in madness

Thursday was the last night for seeing "Son of Saul" at the Magic Lantern. You'll have to search it out through some On Demand service or watch it on DVD. However you choose to see it, assuming you do, you might want to first read the review that I wrote for Spokane Public Radio:

One of the great artistic challenges comes from trying to portray the actuality of great evil. How do you document deeds that are so horrible the mind has difficulty simply accepting them, much less comprehending them?

That’s the problem facing anyone who makes a film about genocide. Confronting the reality of what Hannah Arendt referred to as the “banality of evil,” without resorting to overtly dramatic techniques, takes a special kind of talent. And it’s one that Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes puts on splendid display with his film “Son of Saul.”

Winner of the recent Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, “Son of Saul” is set in the Poland of late 1944, specifically in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Using no framing devices of any sort, Nemes immerses immediately us in the world of the camp’s so-called “sonderkommandos” – prisoners who have been recruited to help facilitate the process of receiving, and then disposing of, prisoners from incoming trains. We watch as the sonderkommandos greet the newcomers – men, women and children, mostly Jewish – and shepherd them to the showers, all while loudspeakers spout encouraging words, telling the doomed crowds that good jobs and hot meals await them just as soon as they have been cleaned.

As all this is taking place, director and co-writer Nemes focuses our attention elsewhere. Placing his camera mostly over the shoulder of one prisoner, Saul Auslander, he plunges us into actions that, in other circumstances, might be seen as mundane: shepherding people to a certain location, overseeing their disrobing, then searching through their discarded clothing – all before loading their corpses, referred to by the German guards as “pieces,” onto gurneys and into the incinerators.

Director and co-writer László Nemes keys on the Saul of the film’s title, especially after he becomes obsessed with the corpse of a young man he claims is his son. Whether this is true never becomes clear. But that makes little difference. While everyone else in the sonderkommando corps, from the lowest worker such as Saul to the club-carrying capos, is concerned not just with their never-ending work but their own imminent demise, Saul become single-minded: He must find a rabbi to give the dead boy a proper Jewish funeral.

Which he does even as his fellow prisoners try to prepare for an armed uprising. Which he does even when his efforts put him continually in danger of being summarily shot – or worse.

And all the while, Nemes’ camera never leaves Saul’s shoulder, rendering everything beyond a couple of feet out of focus. And the stylistic effect is palpable: You’ll find no talking heads as in the documentary “Shoah,” no melodramatic sequences such as a little girl in red (a conceit Steven Spielberg used in “Schindler’s List”), no tearful goodbyes as Roberto Benigni portrayed in “La Vita è Bella.” Only Saul, intent on his obsessive task, as a virtual hell unfolds around him.

Under any other circumstances, Saul’s devotion to his mission might seem baffling. But, then, as any camp survivor can tell you, hell requires it own sense of logic.