Jan. 28--Opening Friday, "Son of Saul" is the first feature by Hungarian writer-director Laszlo Nemes, and it sets a high bar of expectation for his future work while provoking passionate debate about the film itself.
It premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival, winning second prize. Its star, the Budapest-born, Brooklyn-based poet Geza Rohrig, plays a Hungarian prisoner in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Laboring as one of the Sonderkommando, he works in the gas chambers, disposing of corpses, counting the days until he, too, is likely to become a corpse. The film remains tightly within the vicinity of its protagonist throughout, as Saul dedicates himself to a spontaneous act of grace in the worst place on Earth.
The visual strategy of the picture has roots in Nemes' first short film, "With a Little Patience," from 2007. It dealt with the Holocaust in a more oblique way but, likewise, kept very close to the perspective of a single individual.
Over coffee recently in downtown Chicago, Nemes and Rohrig discussed the film and its after-effects. What is the antidote to what Nemes flatly calls "bad Holocaust art"? Simple, he says: "You narrow the field of vision. If you show things frontally, in the usual fashion, you somehow end up reducing the scope of the horror, because you make the viewer believe they can see it all, understand it all. I'm speaking of a frontal representation, more or less, with establishing shots, omniscient narration, that sort of thing. Those things provide a way of escape for the audience, and provide the feeling of distance, and superiority. But when you're talking about the Holocaust, you have to deal with a narrow point of view and trust the viewer to have an intuition of the scope of the human suffering taking place."
This approach, he says, "was our guiding principle, our ethical principle."
Rohrig notes "Son of Saul" has sold 100,000 tickets in Hungary, impressive for a Hungarian picture. The nearly half-million Hungarian Jews deported to their deaths during World War II, the actor notes, remains a difficult subject in the country, where some prefer to whitewash the Hungarian government's complicity with the Nazis.
"The easiest part for me was the shooting of the movie itself," Rohrig says. "Before the movie was very hard, and after the movie was very hard. Before, because I live in New York, and everyone else was in Budapest, I was preparing and reading all these accounts of the Sonderkommando." He needed to understand his character's "numbed state of mind. And after the production it was difficult because, strange as it sounds, I missed it. I missed the place we had created, and the people. How could I miss such a place? I don't know. But when I came back to my everyday life (in Brooklyn), for a time I felt a kind of ... shallowness. Life felt almost illusory to me. Auschwitz was the reality."
Nemes is currently preparing a screenplay about a woman in 1910 Budapest, when Hungary, he says, "was still living in the illusion of its invincibility." The problem with most historical dramas, he says, Holocaust-related or not, is that "they become a showcase of the production values. History shouldn't be a collection of postcards. I don't see it that way, anyway."
He pauses, then adds: "It's almost impossible to make an honest Holocaust movie."
Rohrig finishes the thought. "But it's necessary to try. Seventy years later, I'm not sure humankind got it. How many genocides have we had since?"
"Son of Saul" opens Friday in Chicago.
mjphillips@tribpub.com
