Holocaust

The Zone of Interest (2023)

André Crous

With the horrors of Auschwitz audibly playing out on the periphery, The Zone of Interest paints a unique portrait of life during the Holocaust, but the director mucks it all up with a ghastly and pointlessly artsy aesthetic.

Zone of InterestUnited States/United Kingdom/Poland
3*

Director:
Jonathan Glazer
Screenwriter:
Jonathan Glazer
Director of Photography:
Łukasz Żal

Running time: 105 minutes

Roger Ebert once wrote that “if nothing has happened by the end of the first reel, nothing is going to happen”. That certainly holds true for Jonathan Glazer’s austere Auschwitz drama, entitled The Zone of Interest, which finds itself teetering between a bloodless horror film and a historical art installation. It includes many a scene or shot that lingers far beyond what it merits while revealing little to nothing at all.

Following the most basic of opening credits, the white title emerges on a black screen in a silly font that calls to mind some horror-inspired WordArt, accompanied by eerie sounds that border on comedic. As the title slowly fades and ultimately vanishes into the black screen (presumably a very gross visual representation of the millions of Jews turned to ash inside the crematoriums at Auschwitz), we anticipate a cut. But none comes. Instead, we are left staring at a black screen that probably only lasts a minute or two, though it feels much longer. When we finally encounter an actual diegetic scene, we see a group of people picnicking among lush greenery next to a river. Again, we remain at a distance, waiting an uncomfortably long time for a cut.

We are not introduced to these characters, and can barely see them, as the camera makes no effort to present them to us. Their actions lack both interest and significance, a trend that persists as the movie meanders through its nearly two-hour runtime set against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Poland’s most infamous locale. Occasionally, Glazer opts for artistic detours that alienate more than they enchant. These include using thermal night vision to craft unsettling visuals of a young girl distributing apples in the countryside – presumably to offer sustenance to prisoners labouring outside the camp walls during daytime, although these scenes don’t go anywhere and add nothing except some colour (in black in white) to the narrative. Moreover, the director experiments with auditory elements, presenting blank screens overlaid with sounds that swing between the ominously bizarre and the comically absurd, reminiscent of a frog belching in bass or a cat being strangled.

The primary zone of interest is the house where Rudolf Höss, the commandant at the Auschwitz concentration camp, lives with his wife, Hedwig, and their two sons, two daughters and a baby. What’s intriguing about the house, and the main reason the film exists, is its proximity to the camp. With a vast flower bed full of dahlias, sunflowers and marigolds, as well as an admirable vegetable garden, the property shares a wall with the extermination camp, and it is close enough to hear what is happening on the other side of the wall. 

The scenes at the family home are a mixed bag. The mere proximity of Auschwitz and the audible yet always unseen terror imbue every moment at the Höss home with an undercurrent of tension, despite the seemingly eternal summer weather. Yet, at the same time, Glazer, who also wrote the screenplay, fails to create much drama in these scenes. Life at the Germans’ home is carefree but dull. There is very little to maintain our interest, and many a scene leaves the viewer questioning its inclusion at all.

The only real drama unfolds with Höss’s imminent reassignment to Oranienburg. He has learnt about this but hesitates to inform Hedwig. His wife has dedicated three years to transforming their house into a home, notably commanding Auschwitz prisoners loaned out for labour to fulfil her demands on the property. She also relishes her nickname as the “Queen of Auschwitz”. At home, Höss feels particularly vulnerable, and his high-pitched voice and somewhat effeminate demeanour (despite, or perhaps because of, his undercut hairstyle) weaken his position further. This makes him hesitant to share the news with Hedwig. When he eventually does, her aggressive emotional breakdown confirms his fears were justified.

Hedwig, portrayed by the remarkable Sandra Hüller, embodies a chilling blend of banality and malevolence. Her plain appearance conceals a deep-seated cruelty. Early in the film, she nonchalantly distributes silk panties, plundered from Jewish women, to her maids, while she herself has obtained a giant fur coat with red lipstick in the coat pocket. Neither of the items can work miracles on her bland look, however. Her power over the Jewish labourers in her home enables her sudden shifts to vileness, culminating in a disturbing remark that leaves viewers aghast, wishing upon her the very atrocities her husband perpetrates at Auschwitz.

The rest of the time, however, echoing Hannah Arendt’s famous notion of the “banality of evil”, we observe life proceeding as usual on the family’s side of the wall, with no acknowledgment of the persistent gunshots, blood-curdling screams or plumes of ash rising from the towering chimneys. Most poignantly, people being cremated alive is described with clinical, emotionless precision, while Höss sends dictation after dictation about mundane issues. This is not the life of someone tormented by the genocide he supervises and implements.

And yet, there are glimmers of complexity. While the film thankfully never tries to portray any of the Germans as having genuine concerns about the misery or torture they are inflicting or allowing to be inflicted on the Jews in and around the house, there are hints that these are flesh-and-blood people with flickers of innate humanity that are being suppressed by their decisions to behave in this abominable manner. One is Hedwig’s mother, who arrives for a short visit, and although she is full of praise for and evidently proud of daughter, she also witnesses the giant red flames at night and hears the screams, leading her to a fateful yet understated decision. Even Höss himself, who seems ill at ease in many a social situation, appears to show an inherent and uncontrollable repulsion (one that manifests in an unforgettable, physical way towards the end) to the mass extermination, although he keeps lunging straight into darkness.

The contrast between the banality in the foreground and the horror in the background is silent but shocking. Every time we see fragments of the Auschwitz camp, its watchtower, its row upon row of tightly packed multi-story prison buildings, it is impossible for our imagination not to conjure the worst possible images of what is happening, even as we are never shown a single thing inside the camp while it is operated by the Nazis. But the ever-present clouds of human remains spread everywhere, and there is some solace to be taken that all of this eventually did come to an end.

In its closing frames, The Zone of Interest aims to cast a fresh perspective on the enthusiastic complicity of Germans in the atrocities of the Second World War yet finds itself caught in a web of stylistic excess that detracts from the depth of drama it seeks to portray, especially within the domestic sphere of the Höss family. The concluding sequences, set against the grim backdrop of Berlin’s bureaucratic machinery orchestrating the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews, resort to fish-eye aerial shots that aspire to a godlike surveillance of the unfolding horror, a technique that comes across as both superficial and awkwardly incorporated into the overarching narrative. This emphasis on aesthetic over narrative substance, a hallmark of Glazer’s directorial approach, serves more to obscure than illuminate the film’s core themes, diluting its capacity to engage and disturb its audience.

Despite its bold attempt to navigate the Holocaust’s peripheries with an unyielding gaze, the film ultimately falters, presenting a fragmented tale that fails to resonate on an emotional level. The goal of balancing visual innovation with the monumental scale of its historical subject matter ends in a dissonance that leaves viewers more alienated than enlightened, rendering the film a lamentable venture into Holocaust cinema, its potential dimmed by an overzealous commitment to form at the expense of impactful storytelling, mirroring the disquieting aloofness of its protagonists and falling markedly short of its ambitious goal to make a significant contribution to the narrative of one of history’s bleakest periods.

Persian Lessons (2020)

André Crous

Persian Lessons may not be the most believable film about a Jew’s survival under occupation, but Nahuel Pérez Biscayart’s seemingly infinite skills as an actor make this a worthy addition to the genre.

Persian LessonsRussia/Germany
4*

Director:
Vadim Perelman
Screenwriter:
Ilja Zofin
Director of Photography:
Vladislav Opelyants

Running time: 125 minutes

When people talk about the Holocaust as something we should never forget, they are usually referring to the events: the othering, the captivity, the humiliation, the torture and the extermination of human beings. But what is often forgotten is the individuals themselves. Jews were the primary targets, but what were their names? Who were they?

In a surprisingly effective high-wire act that pays off in large part thanks to the discreet but ultimately emotionally overwhelming performance of its lead actor, Vadim Perelman’s Persian Lessons uses its entire cast to construct a truly unique language. The film centres on a dark-featured Belgian Jew named Gilles, who poses as a Persian named Reza in order to avoid being killed in a firing squad by German officers in France during the Second World War. The officers spare him because they know their captain, who wants to open a restaurant in Iran (commonly known as “Persia” at the time) once the war is over, is looking for someone to teach him Farsi. Thus begin the many months, which turn into years, of Reza teaching “Farsi”, when in fact he only knows a single word: “bawbaw” (dad, بابا).

If you can look past this rather improbable plot point and suspend your disbelief for the two-hour running time, you will be well rewarded. There is one reason we are able to do this, and his name is Nahuel Pérez Biscayart. After making waves with a dizzying performance in 120 BPM, this Argentine actor who has quickly learnt to speak the language like a native Frenchman appears to have no problem forming sentences in German either. Although Biscayart and his character, Reza, are obviously two different people, the former’s facility with languages goes a long way toward making us believe the latter might possibly remember the hundreds of fake words he teaches his captor.

It all starts with a German Army truck driving through a forest in Occupied France. It is transporting a new batch of Jews, including Gilles, a rabbi’s son, who has managed to sneak a sandwich with him in his coat. A fellow passenger trades a first-edition book with a handwritten dedication in Farsi for the food. He explains that it was a gift from “bawbaw” to his son, Reza. Moments later, the first dozen of them are gunned down. Gilles, in the second wave, sees what is coming and insists he is not Jewish but Persian.

At the transit camp, which serves as a limbo between Occupation and certain death at a concentration camp, Hauptsturmführer Klaus Koch (played with chilling friendliness by Lars Eidinger) is delighted to meet “Reza”. Over time, we learn that Koch’s brother lives in Teheran and escaped Germany just before the rise of the Nazi Party. However, Captain Koch is a loyal soldier and has no qualms about being a Nazi, but he is clearly a complicated individual; Perelman drops a few incredibly subtle hints that Koch might be gay, but thankfully there is never a reason to empathise with him, and his final scene in the film will be particularly satisfying to the viewer.

Gilles’s continued survival depends on him teaching a fake language and learning to speak it as if it were a second tongue. He does this with astonishing (at times, impossible) adroitness, but our suspense of disbelief is assisted in this regard by other films about the Second World War we may have seen already, like Life is Beautiful (La vita è bella), in which Roberto Benigni shelters his son from the horrors of war by pretending it is all a game, or In Darkness, whose Jewish characters hide out in sewers in the war-torn Polish city of Lviv. Over the decades, we have learnt in the history books, through survivors’ eyewitness accounts and on film how some people managed to find inhuman strength to hang on to life amid the abominable reality of the Shoah. As a result, this story, dissimilar though it might be to our own experience, does not seem entirely unrealistic.

The film generally steers clear of so many of the obvious moments in similar films. There is a single aerial shot that indicates the ongoing massacre of people and their cremation in nondescript buildings across the European countryside. But in this transit camp, people do not inhale gas in the showers, and the number of swastikas is kept to a minimum. There is no need for Nazi pageantry. One small picture of Hitler in the background of a shot suffices to remind us of the ongoing horrors at the next camp, and the next, and the next.

Perelman, who is best known for his 2003 feature, The House of Sand and Fog, has finally delivered another film on the level of that stunning début. Not just because both films refer to their final moments in their opening scenes but also because when their background tension is unexpectedly released, there will be few dry eyes left in the house. This was mostly thanks to Perelman’s staging in his first film, but here our gratitude goes to Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, who is simply extraordinary as “Reza”.

Persian Lessons is what a mainstream film about Jewish oppression during the Second World War (as opposed to, say, a more artistically minded film like Son of Saul, which was unconventionally staged for maximum visceral effect) should look like. One can nitpick about the necessity of opening the film by revealing the ending or question the decision to have the main character interact so little with his fellow prisoners, but none of this takes away from what is simply a remarkable production.

Viewed at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.

A Loaf of Bread (1960)

André Crous

A Loaf of Bread, which Jan Němec made for his FAMU graduation, is a tense, perfectly structured short film about a Jewish prisoner stealing the titular foodstuff off of a Nazi-operated train.

A Loaf of BreadCzechoslovakia
4.5*

Director:
Jan Němec
Screenwriter:
Jan Němec
Director of Photography:
Jiří Šámal

Running time: 11 minutes

The Jean Valjean character in Victor Hugo’s Les misérables spent 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. In Jan Němec’s 11-minute A Loaf of Bread (Sousto), which he made as a student at FAMU, the national film school in Prague, we find a group of Jean Valjeans waiting to seize the day during the Second World War. If they are caught, the penalty will likely be much more serious than incarceration.

They are Jewish prisoners biding their time next to the train tracks in the waning days of Nazi occupation, presumably somewhere inside Czechoslovakia. Their target is a few tracks over: a train wagon containing loaves of bread. The problem? An armed Nazi officer is circling the wagon to ensure none of them gets a piece.

Němec’s screenplay is an adaptation of Arnošt Lustig’s autobiographical short story “The Second Round” (Druhé kolo). He wrote and directed the film when he was barely 24 years old. The adaptation is perfectly structured with a setup, an execution, a complication and a resolution. It is commendable, however, that even after the climax, there is a lingering ambiguity that leaves the film the slightest bit open-ended and does not wholly dispatch the tension that preceded it.

After all, films about Jews during the Second World War should never be neatly packaged with a spotless ending. The main characters here are not victors besting their captors but rather survivors successfully making it through yet another trial by fire. But it is not just our extratextual knowledge of events that dampens the enthusiasm, it is also the strong reminder that this is but a small victory because much bigger issues are at stake.

The plot revolves around a bread heist. Three young Jewish men check out the train containing the bread. They count the number of steps the officer takes on the other side so that they know how big the window is for one of them to run there, snatch the loaf and run back unnoticed. They draw lots. Tomáš draws the shortest stick.

He quickly accepts the responsibility, but when the time comes, the moment is almost too big, and he hesitates. One second goes by, then another, then another. He finally takes off, sprinting across the no man’s land to reach the train as the officer takes his 18th, 19th, 20th step. Tomáš only has about 35 seconds left to snatch the bread and run back unseen across the tracks. He reaches inside the truck but struggles to grab himself a loaf. The clock keeps ticking. Finally, he grabs a hold of one. But by now he barely has 5 seconds left before the officer turns the corner. As he runs and realises his time has run out, he flings the bread to his friends hiding under another train.

This central piece of the action, less than 2 minutes of the film’s total running time, plainly demonstrates Němec’s skill at building tension to breaking point with the help of the central filmmaking trio: the story, the visuals and the sound, all supporting and boosting each other. All the while, we hear someone counting the seconds. And we know they only have a window of about 56 seconds in total.

A Loaf of Bread is bookended by two brief moments of narration in Tomáš’s voice. The first is explanatory, and the last is optimistic as it conveys the vital information that the Nazi officer was much weaker than the men had anticipated. Despite the most miserable of circumstances, they are undeterred in their mission to feed themselves. Tomáš tells us that they would try again the next day, and luckily the film does not show us what happened. It is not entirely clear that the voice-over was delivered after the war, and thus, after a successful second attempt, or whether it is delivered more or less contemporaneously with the action, in which case it is not at all self-evident that they would survive another try.

When it comes to stories of the Holocaust and the railway transport of Jews, such doubt is essential in clouding out any perception of victory, even in the smallest of moments.

Diamonds of the Night (1964)

André Crous

By mixing the present reality with memories and nightmarish visions and presenting them all as a fragmented whole, Diamonds of the Night offers a personal, often surreal glimpse of the Second World War.

Diamonds of the NightCzechoslovakia
3.5*

Director:
Jan Němec
Screenwriters:
Arnošt Lustig
Jan Němec
Director of Photography:
Jaroslav Kučera

Running time: 65 minutes

Original title: Démanty noci

Diamonds of the Night is an unconventional film about two Jews during the Second World War. For one, the two central characters are taciturn to the point of almost being mute. For another, it is unclear what does and what does not happen in the moment. But it brilliantly conveys a nagging sense of being sucked into a world collapsing onto itself.

This one-hour film, Czech director Jan Němec’s début feature, is as full of contrasts as its title suggests. It is drawn from the eponymous book (more specifically, the short story entitled “Darkness Casts No Shadow”) by Holocaust survivor Arnošt Lustig and is filled with fragments of dreamlike memories, nightmarish visions and brutal reality. Following a black screen and the ominous tolling of a bell, the opening sequence is by far the film’s most memorable. Lasting an impressive 137 seconds, it is an exhilarating unbroken tracking shot that follows two young men (Antonín Kumbera and Ladislav Janský) uphill, frequently in close-up, as they run away from a train. Every so often, another round of bullets reminds us that this is life and death.

Finally, albeit temporarily, they reach safety deep in the forest. Because of the jackets, marked with KL, for Konzentrationslager, they were wearing, one can assume they were headed for a death camp. But the darkness they have just escaped has stained their consciousness and begins to penetrate their lived reality, too, as a giant field of rocks in the middle of the forest soon makes very clear. Suddenly, a tram passes Prague’s Municipal House in broad daylight, and we see one of these men, wearing the KL jacket, jumping in, before there is a cut back to the forest.

The film will be filled with such moments, all without any dialogue – in fact, it takes almost a full 15 minutes before either of the two men speaks a word. Many of the inserts are taken through the window of a moving vehicle, presumably a bus or a train. We see life outside continuing as normal, as if nothing is the matter, but the implication is that we share the point of view of the Jews being transported away from this “normality” that is oblivious to them.

This is confirmed when we get an insert showing the inside of a windowless train compartment meant for cargo, but we see a group of people, some dressed in striped pyjamas. The two nameless young men are seated in a corner at the far back. They devour the corn they had snuck in and put on the shoes they had hidden in their jackets. But this is the past from which they had just managed to break free. Or is it? The story unspools in such a fragmented manner that the pieces ultimately fit together so loosely that the big picture escapes us. There is even room for an (admittedly slightly contrived) reading of the ending as a prelude to the opening.

Diamonds of the Night is at its best during those brief moments, created via the inserts, that give us a vivid sense of the fear and confusion inside the mind of the younger man (Kumbera). A few shots, brilliantly captured by director of photography Jaroslav Kučera (who would become one of the most prominent cameramen of the Czechoslovak New Wave), show tall trees being felled and falling almost straight onto the camera. In another famous composition, ants crawl over an anonymous (either remembered or imagined) young man’s feet, hands and face. And in one of the most action-packed scenes, when he goes to a farmhouse to beg for bread, he imagines himself, over and over again, killing his well-doer out of concern that she will surrender him to the authorities.

But many might view all these interruptions as little more than impressionist smudges on a threadbare storyline, and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong. In particular, there are too many flashbacks (albeit distorted or misremembered, as made clear by the KL coat that Kumbera’s character is already wearing) to brighter days, and they do not appear to contribute substantially to our understanding of the characters or their backgrounds.

The last part of the film is the most interesting because of the tension it evokes through a very simple approach: repetition and little alteration. Having been captured by a group of dimwitted Kraut fogies, members of the so-called Volkssturm militia, the two men are made to stand with their hands in the air and face a blank wall. Meanwhile, a stone’s throw away, the old Germans merrily gorge themselves on chicken and drink pints of beer. Every so often, there is a cut back to the two men, immobile with fear. This alternation between the two shots, as well as the contrast between the silence and the yack-yack-yacking, creates incredible tension.

But while the film gives an atypical insight into the mind of one of its two central characters, the other (Janský) remains an enigma. Towards the end of the film, an apparent flashback even seems to suggest the possibility that he never made it past the opening scene. And as potent as some of the images are, there are just as many shots whose meaning is not immediately evident or are needlessly repeated. 

Diamonds of the Night is a film of contrasts. It uses an experimental approach to conjure up a world of mental imagery that doesn’t always connect with the viewer. And yet, we do get a glimpse of the main character’s inner struggle to make sense of the senselessness around him.

With a Little Patience (2007)

André Crous

With its focus on the point of view of a single character, With a Little Patience anticipates the thematic and visual concerns of its director’s feature film début by eight years.

with-a-little-patience-turelemHungary
4.5*

Director:
László Nemes
Screenwriters:
László Nemes
Timea Varkonyi
Director of Photography:
Mátyás Erdély

Running time: 11 minutes

Original title: Türelem

László Nemes should be the only director ever allowed to tell stories of the Holocaust. Just like his feature film début, Son of Saul, released in 2015, his first short film shot in 35mm, With a Little Patience, made eight years earlier, is remarkably intense in its focus on a single character within the context of Jewish extermination during the Second World War. In this wordless, 11-minute film consisting of a single take, an anonymous office worker first appears to us when she emerges from soft focus, just as Saul Kaminski does in the opening seconds of Son of Saul.

An epigraph taken from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, specifically the poem’s curtain-raising “Burial of the Dead” section, figures on a black screen even before the first image: “I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of light, the silence. / Öd’ und leer das Meer.” These lines perfectly frame the misery and desperation that follow shortly afterwards.

Although the office worker appears in the frame almost immediately when the film opens, the first object that is in focus is the object handed to her by an unknown individual: a brooch. It takes some time before we come to realise the significance of this piece of jewellery, and in the interim, the silence takes on an air of mystery and tension that finally breaks with tremendous force, even from far away, in the closing moments.

As the narrative unspools, a nagging sense of misfortune hangs in the air, created in large part by the dark interior where most of the film is set. The setting is nondescript. The space is clearly an office of some sort, but the anonymous woman whom we follow for most of the film does not speak to anyone, and the only words spoken to her are a whisper, their meaning unknown to us. Furthermore, as Nemes would do again in Son of Saul, the focus is so shallow that the actions of all except this woman are presented as nebulous blurs of movement.

Very little happens, although it is obvious the woman is hiding something, and all along, we wonder, “Where did this brooch come from, and why is she clearly not supposed to have it?”

It is only at the very end – when the camera’s perspective changes, and in an unfortunate moment of directorial timidity, we leave the confines of the main character as the focus is racked to show events much farther away – that we grasp the spatio-temporal context of the film: a death camp somewhere on Nazi-occupied territory during the Second World War. The brooch is one of the pieces of jewellery that belonged to a Jewish prisoner, and this woman dressed in white, calmly and expressionlessly doing clerical work amid the grotesque carnage occurring just offscreen, is materially benefitting in her own small way from the subjugation, incarceration and liquidation of the Jews.

But this is but one interpretation.

While some may whimsically use the title to describe the lack of any robust dramatic development during the first two-thirds, this considerable part of the film actually works to heighten the impact of the final revelation on the viewer. By the time the chilling closing minutes roll around, the sudden shift in tone produces a visceral kick to the gut.

In With a Little Patience, Nemes offers a clear vision of his cinematic principles and a firm foundation on which he would ultimately go on to build the modern-day masterpiece that is Son of Saul. Tipping his hat to masters of the art form that include Andrei Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr, Nemes uses a carefully choreographed single take to exquisite effect and proves that his is a voice that will reverberate through the industry in the years to come.

Son of Saul (2015)

André Crous

Tight focus, searing details and a wholly original approach combine to produce one of most powerful Holocaust films of all time in this début feature film of László Nemes.

son-of-saul-fiaHungary
4.5*

Director:
László Nemes 
Screenwriters:
László Nemes 
Clara Royer
Director of Photography:
Mátyás Erdély

Running time: 105 minutes

Original title: Saul fia

The world didn’t know it needed another Holocaust drama until Son of Saul (Saul fia) came along. Focused on one lone protagonist – the titular Saul (Géza Röhrig), a Hungarian – for its running time by blocking out almost everything around him through shallow focus and an aspect ratio that is close to a square, the film is 105 minutes of pure immersion in the tension that pervades a concentration camp (press materials state it is Auschwitz, but this is not evident to the outsider) towards the end of the Second World War.

The opening is breathtaking, as Saul approaches us in a blurred shot of a forest landscape until his face appears in a sharp close-up. For the next few minutes, we follow him, swinging from the front to the back, over his shoulders, as a train arrives, and the latest group of Jewish prisoners offload their belongings and make their way into the camp. His face does not betray a single emotion. However long he has been here, he has been hardened by his experience, and he goes about a range of unthinkable duties with the robotic dedication of a drone. And yet, there are signs that underneath the surface, he is fully aware of the savagery all around him.

In one of the film’s first scenes, we see a group of prisoners, likely the ones who arrived in the opening scene, led to the showers. Saul, wearing a coat with giant red X on the back, which means he belongs to the exclusive Sonderkommando burdened with cleaning the gas chambers after executions have taken place, among other ghastly chores, stands to one side. We see the doors closing, and soon the screaming starts. The screams become shrieks, and the shrieks turn to wails, before silence announces death. When the doors open, the bodies are dragged outside, and the victims’ clothes, neatly hung in the cloakroom, are ransacked for anything that glitters. Saul covers his nose and mouth with a thin piece of cloth to ward off the stench of the deceased.

But there is a slight groaning among the heap of corpses, and it belongs to a young boy. The doctor examines him, listens to his wheezing chest, and then grabs his head, closes his nasal passages and puts a hand over his mouth. Within seconds, the boy stops breathing. Saul sees all of this, and inside him, something breaks. He desperately looks for any identification among the pile of clothes, but he finds none. Later, he asks the doctor not to dispose of the body after the autopsy.

Despite Saul’s lack of visible emotion, we learn over time that the boy is his son, or that he thinks the boy is his son. This piece of information seems utterly far-fetched, not only because the boy was serendipitously the only survivor from the group but also because the group of prisoners did not even come from Hungary. Nonetheless, Saul is determined that the boy be given a proper Jewish burial, and he spends the rest of the film trying to track down a rabbi who would say Kaddish, a prayer in honour of the dead.

Many of the scenes consist of a single take, or what feels like a single take. It bears mentioning at this point that this is director László Nemes’s début feature – a fact that seems astounding, given the obvious challenges of choreographing the actors as well as the camera as they move through a variety of spaces. Nemes’s experience with film does include, however, a stint as assistant director on The Man from London (A londoni férfi) by Béla Tarr, famous for his use of long takes.

This approach to his story is tremendously effective, and even though some of the takes include long stretches without dialogue, there is not a single dull moment in the entire film. On the contrary, the viewer becomes more and more tense as the story continues to develop. Nemes accomplishes this task by focusing on the details without showing them explicitly. The tight locus that is Saul is the point from which we glimpse the chaos around him, and while there are no real establishing shots anywhere in the film, it is clear this is hell on earth.

From piles of ash (cremated bodies) being shovelled into a lake to prisoners lining up next to a pit to be shot point-blank the one after the other, the things we see here – sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly – are gruesome and will haunt many a viewer. And yet, the filmmaker never goes for spectacle, because the brief events here are always extensions of the horror that is all around Saul, and by their presence, they help us to comprehend what it is from which he seeks to escape.

Son of Saul is a tour de force like few others. It keeps the viewer guessing, not only about the trajectory but about the nature of the chaos taking place in front of our very eyes, and is without question a Holocaust film that ranks among the very best ever made.

Viewed at the 2015 San Sebastián International Film Festival

Fateless (2005)

André Crous

Hungary
4.5*

Director: 
Lajos Koltai
Screenwriter:
Imre Kertész
Director of Photography: 
Gyula Pados

Running time: 140 minutes

Original title: Sorstalanság

If you have any sense of compassion, films about the Holocaust are very difficult to watch. And yet, the stories that they tell must be acknowledged and absorbed by a generation that could easily forget the events of more than 70 years ago.

At the time I am writing this review, I haven’t seen a Holocaust film, either fictional or documentary, since I sat down to watch Claude Lanzmann’s staggering multi-disc Shoah (1985) six years ago. Lanzmann and Alain Resnais, whose Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) is considered to be an equally impressive achievement reminding us of the need to remember, both constructed films of the Holocaust as reflections of the past that still have striking resonance in the present.

Fateless‘s main character, who features in every single scene and is somehow involved in every single shot, is Gyuri “Gyurka” Köves (played by Marcell Nagy), a teenage boy with a mop of curly black hair, who lives in Budapest with his father and stepmother, part of a Jewish community in Budapest at the beginning of the Second World War. First, his father is sent to a labour camp, and then he himself is picked from a bus and sent to concentration camps, where he stays for the duration of the war, along with thousands of other Jewish Hungarians.

The young actor playing Gyurka is perfectly cast: Exactly on the verge of adulthood, he conveys innocence without childishness, and sometimes he seems to look straight at us, engaging our sympathy without soliciting it. His ideas are still evolving, and during a conversation about the essence of Jewishness, he wants to comfort a girl he has a crush on, who doesn’t understand why being a Jew makes her the object of so much hatred, but he doesn’t quite have the experience to do that yet. It is a touching moment, despite the evident political slant (fortunately, the only time the film hammers home the point) and one that obviously relates to the film as a whole.

Fateless is beautiful. It is the debut film of cinematographer Lajos Koltai and is clearly the work of someone with an eye for visual impact. The film’s colours are very muted: Mostly, the images resemble sepia photographs, and often the colour scheme is almost completely monochrome, with only hints of colour in the frame, especially the colour yellow, which of course is the colour of the infamous Star of David badges sewn onto the clothing of the Jewish population.

The film’s many different moments are not filled with the horrors one usually associates with Holocaust films but add up to a very human portrait of the people in the concentration camps and their desire to support each other. The fragmentary nature of the narrative, especially in the second half, is not always entirely effective, but the fragments themselves are like small gems in the mud of the Second World War.

A few scenes stand out for the emotion they are likely to evoke and very often the soundtrack of Ennio Morricone (one of the best he has ever scored, with the always incredible Lisa Gerrard adding her voice to some very emotive pieces) plays a significant role. At one point, the prisoners are asked to entertain their fellow inmates, and they sing a song whose relevance to their plight is difficult to miss:

What does a girl dream on a moonlit night?
That her prince will come on a steed of pure white

It’s a dream so sweet, but soon she must wake
And princes are scarce, so it’s all a mistake

Fateless ends on a very different note from most of these kinds of films and may rub some people the wrong way, but the point that the film makes illuminates the human ability to find light in the darkness and to hold on to the goodness in some people and use it as a shelter against the dreadful acts of others.