'Son of Saul' is not for the faint of heart. Laszlo Nemes's narrative and camera breathe life into the daily life of 'Sonderkommando' or work units, mainly made up of Jews, who, with the threat of death, forced to clean up after the gassing, the incineration of bodies, the cataloging and warehousing of clothing, shoes, eye glasses, jewelry, money, and the like of the victims of the Holocaust. We are in an endless coming and going of tasks and orders, as though the Nazis had recreated an ant hill of special units to go about the defined tasks of extermination. And even these Jews momentarily spared, have a short life span for they too will go to the gas chambers, replaced by fresh bodies, who, in turn, would,too, end up as ash or buried in pits. "Son of Saul' is a buzz of rumor, as though it were a parliament of symphony of harsh, discordant sounds in many languages in the background as Saul and his fellow worker ants work incessantly at tasks, any, and always at the whim of the Germans or Kapos, the more privileged prisoners who supervise the prisoners. And into the world of exhausted drabness melancholic and eroded of spirit, a young boy who by miracle survives the gassing. But not for long since a Nazi doctor suffocates him; orders his autopsy to know how and why he survived where none have before. In this young boy Saul sees a son, a son he never had, but a Jewish soul mate whom he wants to bury according to Jewish ritual--no postmortem examination, no incineration--a recitation of Kaddish for the dead and burial in the earth with a body intact. And so in this sinister environment, Saul go in search of a rabbi to perform the funeral rites. In his quest, the camera in all its greyness takes us into the life of Sonderkommando, the plotting to escape, the taking of photographs so that still life photos will be witness to the hell that was the final solution; the bribery, the brutality, the smug violence of kapo and Nazi. And yet, in secret some Sonderkommando manage to celebrate the Sabbath in an abbreviated form. Yet, that is a simple pleasure in a day or night that is at the beck and call of aiding the Nazi in the destruction of the Jews and other despised races of Europe. It is a world without relaxation; we squirm with the work units as they remove gassed bodies, scrub floors and walls of gas chambers ready to receive another batch of Jews. And so it went until the Russians liberated the camps, but that's another film I would be churlish to give away the end, inevitable that it is. Nemes is fascinated as he is horrified by the Sonderkommando, unwilling or willing tools of mass destruction. After seeing the film, we can see why the 2015 Palme D'or at Cannes went to Nemes' film.
Review of Son of Saul
