To say the Holocaust drama has been on a roll ever since it debuted in Cannes - where it won the Grand Prize - is an understatement. This past Sunday, it was named Best Foreign Language Film at the Critics’ Choice Awards.
Son of saul film trailer full#
Certainly the increasing urgency, even desperation, with which the prisoners are despatched would bear this out since the ovens are full of bodies, a later trainload of new arrivals bypass the gas chamber altogether, and are shoved straight into a pit, shot and burnt.First-time helmer Laszlo Nemes’ Son Of Saul picked up a Foreign Language Oscar nomination last Thursday after it won the Golden Globe the Sunday before. An indication of the date comes in a snatch of whispered conversation suggesting that Soviet forces are about to take Krakow, which would place the action in January 1945. We’re never told in which camp the film is set, though given that all Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and that an actual rebellion by Sonderkommandos took place there in late 1944, we can assume this is the intended location. As Nemes commented when he accepted his Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film earlier this year, “Even in the darkest hours, there might be a voice within us that allows us to remain human.” In the film’s closing moments, Saul sees another boy, alive this time, and his joyous smile tells us that this putative son, real or not, has become his purpose – a personal expiation for what he’s done to his fellow Jews and a reason for persisting. Is the boy Saul finds gasping and all but dead, sole survivor of the gas chamber, really his son? A fellow prisoner who evidently knew Saul before insists that he never had a son, though if he did and the boy was born (as he suggests) outside his marriage, there’s a hint that the young woman called Ella, with whom he has a charged, near-wordless exchange, might be the mother.
“You failed the living for the dead,” he’s told when his monomania causes him to botch a vital mission but from this abyss – as the film’s last offscreen sound effect tells us with grim finality – no one in the end can escape. From this perspective, Saul’s desperate quest to find a rabbi to say Kaddish over the dead boy he claims is his son is perhaps ultimately no more futile than the plotting of his fellow Sonderkommandos (privileged prisoners who help to control the rest) to escape. Nemes uses that same lethal clang to close several sequences, pairing it with a cut to black, as if to convey that everyone held in the camp, no matter their status, is effectively in the death chamber. The door closes with a heavy, ominous clang a moment later we hear muffled screams and hammerings on the door. “Don’t forget your hook number,” the voice adds solicitously. At other times it’s all too easy to tell, as in the devastating opening sequence when the latest trainload of Jewish prisoners, having hung their clothes on hooks, are ushered naked into the shower room while a reassuring voice tells them that their various skills will be needed in the camp, and that soup and hot coffee will be ready for them once they’ve showered.
Some of the time we’re left to guess what the offscreen noises indicate.
UK release date 29 April 2016 in cinemas and on VoD Rabbi Frankel, ‘Kályhás’ rabbi Jerzy Walczak
Hungary/France/Israel/Bosnia and Herzegovina/USA 2015