In a new film opening Friday in the Bay Area, a half-starved man carries the body of a dying boy through an environment that defies easy description. "Hellish" doesn't do it justice. Son of Saul is by any standard a memorable piece of storytelling.
The time is 1944. The place is the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. The film's protagonist (dare we call him a hero?) is Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig), a man whose tragic fate is to be a member of the Sonderkommandos, prisoners afforded privileges by their Nazi captors if they agree to guide newly arrived prisoners to the gas chambers on the false promise that these prisoners will be fed and clothed before being assigned meaningful work. It was the despicable evil at the heart of Hitler's "Final Solution" that Jews (and gays, Gypsies, Catholics, Protestants, Socialists and Communists) would not only be murdered, but in effect, any memory of them, their DNA and all artifacts, would be obliterated, the human slate wiped clean, without their blood adhering to the hands of their Nazi executioners.
In a scene from director/co-writer Lazlo Nemes' film, the condemned man speaks up. His remarks are directed at another Jewish prisoner, a doctor about to extinguish the life of a young boy on his dissecting table.
Saul: "Don't cut this boy. Leave him as is!"
Doctor: "No. I'm a prisoner like you. You'll have five minutes with him tonight. But in the end he will burn with the rest. What's your name?"
Saul: "Auslander. Saul."
Geza Rohrig, the Hungarian-born actor who plays Saul, discussed his character's actions in a TV interview with PBS host Charlie Rose. "That's when Saul's mission is born. He realizes he belongs to the boy, and the boy belongs to him. No matter what, he's going to do his very best to bury this boy. This boy survived the gas chamber, so he beat the system. Nobody was meant to survive the gas chamber. The boy survives, and now is being killed a second time by the Nazi doctor. Saul understands that this death stands out from the other deaths he's able to [feel]. So he owes this boy, he's grateful to this boy for [allowing him to feel again]. What good can you do for a dead person, besides burying him?"
Son of Saul's makers allow us to see some prisoners preparing for one of the rare armed uprisings against the Nazi killing machine. But now, a quibble. Son of Saul is a motion picture with a normal running time, just a shade over two hours. If anything, the subject demands a larger canvas, an epic length, let's say the scale that German wunderkind Rainer Werner Fassbinder allowed his crowning achievement, a 931-minute version of Alfred Doblin's sprawling novel about a German working-class district in the 1920s, Berlin Alexanderplatz.
But what we have here is a human-scale, single-sitting masterpiece. Son of Saul joins the category of essential films on the Holocaust �" Shoah (503 minutes), Schindler's List, The Pawnbroker �" that are capable of breaking through our blocked feelings, a singular experience that is meant to shadow or spoil other experiences until its truth can never be denied or forgotten again.