Son of Saul, the feature debut by Hungarian director László Nemes has an audacious premise: placing the viewer in the shoes of a member of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The film follows Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig) over the course of two days at the Nazi death camp. He is at the end of his tenure as a prisoner tasked with corralling fellow Jews into mass gas chambers and disposing of the evidence as quickly as possible before he and other members of the Sonderkommando guide the next batch of frightened prisoners with promises of “After the shower, you will have some tea.”
The film’s opening shot is a stunning moment of establishing thesis and aesthetic. After the film’s stark opening title card explains the role of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, the audience will notice the idyllic chirping of birds. The viewer is confronted with a blurry shot of a lush wooded area in a tight, boxy 1.33:1 aspect ratio. There appears to be two young people (possibly children) crouched by a tree apparently digging in the dirt. A blurry figure approaches the center of the screen until his ragged, pale face with a cracked lip comes into focus, the mystery of everything else around him still blurred out. It is the jittery Saul, remarkably portrayed by non-actor and poet Röhrig.
It’s a crafty shot that reveals the film’s shallow focus and how nothing will appear as clearly as it might seem, as the film stays sharply focused on the man whose face you now clearly see. The cinematography by Mátyás Erdély, who worked in similar close up but to very different effect in James 
White (James White uses meticulous performances and precise camerawork to make damaged person sympathetic and real — a film review), creates an incredibly subjective experience. It’s not so much a first person perspective as it is presenting an out-of-body experience for the film’s main character. Saul goes about his job with meticulous, hasty precision, reassuring the victims, then cleaning out their hung clothes of valuables for the Nazis to collect and catalog before entering the chambers to help drag out the nude, lifeless corpses and stack them up for mass incineration.
Though details are often blurred out in his periphery, that doesn’t make them any less real. It’s a cinematic choice by Nemes to capture the sense that Saul is tuning out his environment to come to grips with his complicity, a role that bides him a little more time to live before he too is executed. Obscuring the atrocities only heightens the horror. It’s a respectful representation of the incomprehensible. Nemes never heightens the film beyond this. There are hardly any noticeable cuts in the flow of the action, which features long takes. There is also no music score. The soundtrack is industrial horror show from the rhythmic puffing of the train the victims ride in on, to the screams and metallic scratching on the walls as they are gassed. Even the plentiful gunshots from the SS troops become almost rhythmically routine in the film’s diegetic din.
Beyond the sensory experience of Son of Saul, Nemes’ script, co-written with historian Clara Royer explores a complex dynamic of what happens over the course of the film. Saul latches onto a boy who is pulled from the chamber still breathing but is suffocated to death by a camp doctor. Saul seems to think this boy is his son, and he becomes bent on finding a rabbi among the prisoners to say Kaddish and give the child a proper burial. Meanwhile, a revolt is being planned around him. In another layer of complexity, it helps to understand that among the Sonderkommando, there are Polish and Hungarian Jews who hold an animosity toward each other, revealing the profound sense of divisiveness in humanity. Even under the same belief system there are tribal allegiances, and even as their captors and killers push them around, the internal hate among victims persists, enhancing the film’s Inferno-like quality.
As an effort to capture the horrors of Auschwitz, Son of Saul is incredible in how it harnesses the tools of cinema. From decisions in framing and focus to soundtrack and storytelling, Son of Saul is a remarkable achievement, and the film has indeed been duly recognized. It came out of Cannes last year with the Grand Prix and charged ahead to its current nomination for the Best Foreign Language Film prize at the upcoming Oscars, where most expect it to win. Holocaust films always matter, and Son of Saul is an indisputable effort in not just technical filmmaking but in channeling cinema’s power to capture subjective perspective. However, respect belongs to history. No matter the level of gruesome imagery, Holocaust cinema is mere representation. You will come out shaken but with the knowledge you are alive. Son of Saul is a life experience and a confrontation worth submitting to if only to remind yourself of the horror sentience is capable of inspiring in man, and Nemes should be commended for that.
- Tower Theater
- Cinema Paradiso Fort Lauderdale
- Living Room Theaters
- Carmike Muvico Parisian
- Movies Delray
- Movies of Lake Worth
For other theaters in the U.S., visit this link. All images are courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics who also provided a DVD screener for the purpose of this review.
Phoenix offers a potent mystery hidden in plain sight by playing with film noir tropes — a film review
August 4, 2015
A mystery movie doesn’t always need to have its mysteries hidden away, obliging itself to constantly stringing along the audience with questions and twists. There are other ways to create thrills, and German director/writer Christian Petzold (Film review: ‘Barbara’ – transcending suspicion with grace) has devised an unequivocal experience with Phoenix. Working with regular co-screenwriter Harun Farocki, Petzold has adapted Hubert Monteilhet’s 1961 novel Le Retour des cendres (Return from the Ashes), which already had a bit of a convoluted film adaptation in 1965 by J. Lee Thompson starring Maximilian Schell. Hence, the possible title change.
There is some elegance in Monteilhet’s original title, which offers a more deliberate reference to where the film’s main character comes from, as a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. However, Petzold and Farocki have streamlined the story quite a bit, dropping characters, and focusing profoundly on the notion of love and the past, and the two characters at the center of the film, the Jewish singer Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss, Petzold’s go-to lead actress) who finds several levels of freedom following liberation by the allied forces, and Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), her gentile husband, a pianist who performed with her, until the Nazis separated them. He thinks she, as is the case with her entire family, is dead.
Nelly first appears onscreen with her face wrapped in bandages. She is driven into Berlin by the only friend she has left, Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), where a surgeon will help repair her face, a process he clarifies is “not reconstruction” but “recreation.” Though Lene promises Nelly that they will find their true sanctuary in Palestine, Nelly remains obsessed with finding her husband in the ruins of Berlin. Though Lene tells Nelly that Johnny betrayed her to the Nazis, Nelly goes out at night secretly searching. Nelly comes across Johnny working in the maybe too aptly named Phoenix lounge. She takes advantage of her new face to feel him out and introduces herself as Esther. So begins a deception that explores moral character in the wake of an atrocious past.
Lene is desperate to find love again, but the question always lingers whether Johnny loved her to begin with, and if so, what was that loved based on? The answer might seem simple when Johnny notes enough of a similarity in “Esther” to his wife 
that he comes up with a scheme to use her. He suggests that she might be able to impersonate Nelly, so he might get his hands on her inheritance. But Phoenix is a much more complicated film than that. Petzold instead has created a film that feels like an inversion of the film noir. The femme fatale is duplicitous, yes, but she loves someone, or an idea of someone, and that someone is a man she is both scamming and scamming for.
The conflict and irony of her actions is what make Phoenix‘s drama so compelling. It’s in the small moments when Nelly lets out a smile behind Johnny’s back, as he gives her a ride on a bike to their old hiding place. There’s a practicality in his relationship with “Esther” that fills a void for Nelly who wants to be herself in the past, but cannot seem to face her new reality even with a new face. The lack of existence is revealed an intensity that lies in the smallest gestures.
Not only is Petzold working again with his co-writer and Hoss, who again brings a soft-spoke grace to a complicated female character, but also with cinematographer Hans Fromm. Fromm has always had a knack for brightening the dark moods of Petzold’s films, and he does it again in Phoenix. Film noir comparisons would be incomplete without recognizing how this movie plays with shadow and light. From the harsh red neon glow of club Phoenix, the site of Nelly’s rebirth, to her struggles of devotion enhanced by the subtle contrast of shadow and light in the home Nelly and Lene are taken in as lodgers, there is hardly any incidental lighting. There’s also a different kind of light and darkness in the set pieces. There are deep shadows in the ruinous devastation of Berlin that speak to the past of the city as well as that of Nelly and the natural, green bucolic beauty in the still very intact, lakeside mansion where Lene once hid from the Nazis.
An intelligent film with style to spare, Phoenix is driven by a strange mystery, in that it invites the audience to contemplate deception from another angle. Driven by a dramatic irony that lets the audience in on everything, Phoenix becomes something else entirely, much like the main character who finds empowerment in her wounds.
Screening update: By popular demand the following have for Sept. 4:
Aventura Mall 24 Theatres – Aventura
Indian River 24 – Vero Beach
Silverspot at Coconut Creek – Coconut Creek
Last Picture Show 5 – Tamarac
Phoenix runs 98 minutes, is in English and German with English subtitles and is rated PG-13 (it has its disturbing moments). It opens in our South Florida area on the following schedule:
AUGUST 7:
- MDC’s Tower Theater in Miami
- Miami Beach Cinematheque
- Cinema Paradiso Fort Lauderdale
AUGUST 14:
- Bill Cosford Cinema in Coral Gables
- Movies of Lake Worth
- Movies of Delray 5
- Living Room Cinema 4 in Boca Raton
AUGUST 21:
- Silversport Cinema in Naples
- Prado Stadium 12 in Bonita Springs
SEPTEMBER 9:
- Lake Worth Playhouse
It first premiered in Miami at the Miami International Film Festival. IFC Films shared a DVD screener for the purpose of this review. All images are courtesy of Christian Schulz for IFC Films.
Independent Ethos 