László Nemes
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The result is comparable to and yet distinct from what Hungarian director László Nemes realized in his merciless Holocaust drama Son of Saul (2015).
It’s the use of blind spots, obscurities, veiled events rather than visibility that make László Nemes’s 2015 Son of Saul (executed in 85 shots of varying lengths) such a revealing addition to Holocaust cinema: the film brings us close to the protagonist, but never allows us the false privilege of seeing what he sees.
Some recent examples include the Best Picture winning Birdman and the Best Foreign Language Film winning Son of Saul , as well as a few television attempts in the same vein ( Mr. Robot and the Haunting of Hill House ).
Viewers concerned that they might be in for a gruelling first-person war story like Come and See or Son of Saul , two masterpieces that Mendes has cited as influences, can rest easy.
In this respect, the film recalls László Nemes' Son of Saul, which presents the soul-searing experiences of a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz where the camera remains fixed on the face of its title character throughout; we're constantly aware of the atrocities happening in our presence, but they remain at all times obscured by the locked perspective.
Consider the number of titles that became either art-house staples or pop culture touchstones: Night and Fog (1955), Sophie’s Choice (1982), Shoah (1985), Au revoir les enfants (1987), Schindler’s List (1993), Life Is Beautiful (1997), etc.
It’s not as graphic as many – there are more cordwood-piled corpses in Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful than are seen here – but Hungarian director László Nemes and actor Géza Röhrig, who plays the titular Saul and is in virtually every shot, employ a heart-shattering form of “you are there” filmic composition to put the audience dead center amidst the horrific, workaday world.
Nevertheless, it is far from Oscar-winning crowd-pleasers like Schindler’s List or Life Is Beautiful.
There's some ambiguity over whether the boy is Saul's illegitimate son, but the smallness of this gesture serves as a powerful rebuke to the martyrs and saints that populate Holocaust narratives like Schindler's List or Life Is Beautiful.
Ostensibly a Holocaust film, it is unlike any other film created on the subject, and that includes 2015's first-person perspective Son of Saul about a man fighting to survive life in the camps.
This marks a bold choice that sets the film apart from other acclaimed Oscar-winning Holocaust films like Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, Roman Polanski's The Pianist, and László Nemes's Son of Saul.
Compared to something like Son of Saul (2015) or The Painted Bird (2019), which are grueling, violent spectacles, Glazer’s sense of dread is paired into meager focal points who, unbeknownst to themselves, have become emotional zombies.
From “Schindler’s List” to “The Pianist” to “Inglorious Basterds,” the Third Reich’s meticulous planning of mass extinction in Europe has inspired countless filmmakers to create genocide narratives.
It’s impossible to be a lover of cinema without having been down this road before in films like Schindler’s List and The Pianist.
The Foreign Language Film category is practically a breeding ground for the genre—there’s a clear line back from last year’s champion in the category, Ida, to Poland’s 2011 nominee In Darkness, to Austria’s The Counterfeiters (winner, 2007), to Sophie Scholl–The Final Days (2005), Downfall (2004), Twin Sisters and Želary (2003), Nowhere in Africa (winner, 2002), on and on and on.
It’s an exemplar of the latter-day form of the “third-act movie,” like “Dunkirk,” or László Nemes’ “Son of Saul”: while bursting with energy, the characters are reacting to confinement, there are only shreds of backstory, the characterization is mostly in the form of action.