Saturday 10th Oct – ‘Son of Saul’
A film about the ‘Sonderkommando’ – those prisoners who were tasked with burning the bodies at Auschwitz – was never going to be an easy watch but it is an extraordinary piece of work. The camera stays in close up at all times, in the protagonists’s face, so that the background is often blurred. Thus, the myriad atrocities are both onscreen and yet unseen, allowing our imagination to conjure up more horrors. As if circumstances were not difficult enough for our hero, Saul, his life is further complicated by the fact he knows that the Sonderkommado are themselves due to be liquidated at any moment and yet it is at this point that he embarks upon a personal quest, to find a rabbi to bury the corpse of a boy he identifies with, as his son.
At times, the film comes close to exploring what Hannah Arendt termed in her fascinating study of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, ‘the banality of evil’. In the Q&A afterwards, the director was at pains to point out that he had wanted this tone and specifically avoided common traits such as ‘good and bad Nazis’ – so, here, the soldiers are faceless uniforms, devoid of personality. Indeed, when I visited Auschwitz, myself, I found that this was the true horror of the place – the mundane buildings, the banal, mechanical nature of mass execution: Room 1 your outside trappings are removed, Room 2 you are murdered, Room 3 you are converted into dust. You hear, in the film, the false hope that was metered out – guards telling prisoners to remember the number above the hook where they left their clothes and baggage, so that they could retrieve them after their ‘shower’.
Rarely in Holocaust films, though, do we hear the sounds of the panic and horror from inside the gas chamber, when such dreadful realisation dawns, and this film does not spare us this, a mere flicker in the eyes of our hero suggesting a distress which he cannot manifest. Here, though, is a problem too, how can we invest emotionally with a lead character who is such an enigma, who’s face is, for most of the journey, a blank mask, and who’s motivations are deliberately obfuscated (any back story exposition having been deliberately cut by the director)? I think the director meant to indicate with Saul’s quest that a tiny shred of humanity survives even the most dire of circumstances but I am left uncertain. Despite this, the cleverness of the film is that it continues to haunt me some time later, not so much by what I observed but by what I imagined existed on the periphery, the onscreen blur, which Saul, himself, sought to shut out from his consciousness.