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The movie opens with a title card informing us the Sonderkommandos were killed and replaced every four months, and early in the film, another prisoner reminds Saul their time is almost up. And when he does find someone who’s willing -after getting two men killed and losing the explosive powder in the process- he’s unable to bury his son in the camp as another prisoner claims the elected gravesite is his spot.Īs in a classical Hollywood movie, the film puts additional pressure on its protagonist by giving him a deadline. A fellow Sonderkommando who used to be a rabbi tells him not to bother-throwing the issue of whether Saul’s goal is noble or absurd into the viewer’s lap. He also has difficulty finding someone to recite the prayer. First of all, Saul has to get a hold of the body, but when he goes to the camp pathology lab to grab it, not only is it not there but a coterie of doctors and German officers walk in on him before he can leave.
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1 That it has may be partly attributable to the fact that there’s a proven audience for historical dramas about World War II ( Downfall, Black Book, and Ida all did respectable business on this side of the Atlantic), and perhaps more importantly, its protagonist has a clearly defined goal that drives the plot-not, as in The Grey Zone, to save the child -a Nazi doctor quietly suffocates Saul’s “son” immediately after his discovery- but to give him a Jewish burial, which is no easy task under the circumstances. Given the movie’s reticence (to say nothing of its unrelenting grimness), one wouldn’t expect it to be getting such a wide release in North America. (Towards the end of the film, another prisoner questions whether Saul-who’s perhaps not in his right mind-even had a son in the first place.) Another enduring mystery pertains to the female prisoner (Juli Jakab) who smuggles explosive powder to the Sonderkommandos: How does she know Saul’s name, and why does he pull away his hand when she tries to touch him? By revealing so little about Saul’s past, the film implies that life in the camp has stripped him of his individuality, reducing him to a mere cog in the machinery of genocide. Saul (Géza Röhrig) can’t be sure himself if the boy he finds still breathing in the gas chamber is actually his son, as he never locates the child’s identity card, nor is he able to determine if the transport on which he arrived came from Hungary. Conversely, in this movie the camera sticks to the protagonist like glue, severely restricting the range of knowledge we have access to, and the laconic exposition raises more questions than it answers. Of the two films, Nelson’s is the more classical as its narration is both omniscient (in order to accommodate the large ensemble cast) and highly communicative. But while they share essentially the same subject matter, the experience of watching each movie is fundamentally different: Nelson’s film is talky and philosophical, whereas Nemes’ is terse and visceral, the kind of movie you feel in your bones. As in Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone (2001), the central character is spurred to action when he discovers a child who’s survived the gas chamber, and the film ends with an uprising like those which occurred at Treblinka and Sobibór in 1943 and Auschwitz in 1944.
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László Nemes’ Son of Saul (2015) is the second movie I’ve seen specifically about the Sonderkommandos-units of Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps tasked with leading people into the gas chambers, pinching their valuables, and disposing of the bodies. The Man Who Loved Children: László Nemes’ Son of Saulīy Michael Sooriyakumaran Volume 19, Issue 12 / December 2015 5 minutes (1133 words)