Son of Saul Review

The second movie I saw at the Laemmle was Son of Saul (2015), the Oscar foreign film award winner and the first (!) feature film of László Nemes, a Hungarian director. Much like Embrace of the Serpent (2015), it was made with a budget and schedule that if proposed to the somewhat complacent Hollywood industry would be deemed "impossible." As the first Oscar win for Hungary in the foreign film category in 35 years, Son of Saul may be considered significant. But if all one knew of Son of Saul was its impressive award sheet, one could not begin to appreciate the film's profundity, monument, quintessence, or import. For that, one must experience the film.

The bleak concentration camp serves as a backdrop for a captivating epic that pits one man, Saul, against all odds in a quest that is baffling to all around him. Why does he go to such lengths, compromise so much, take on so much risk only to bury a single body that may or may not belong to his son? For Saul, the identity of the boy is in fact of little importance, for his significance is not in the name he held while living but in the moral outlet he provides Saul after his death. For Saul, burying the boy is an act of moral rebellion against the immorality in which he is trapped and to which forced to contribute. How can a man remain moral in a world governed by the "banality of evil?" He must focus his morality onto a task he can accomplish.

The director choses to keep us uncomfortably close to Saul throughout the film. The choice serves three purposes. Firstly, it allows him through a shallow depth of field to blur the horrors by which Saul is surrounded: dead bodies, mass graves, ovens. By doing so, he ensures that the audience never grows desensitized to the gore around Saul. Secondly, it forces the audience into an intimate and claustrophobic space. They live Saul's life as they're own. Thirdly and most valuably, the frame is consumed by Saul's face, and his reactions to what he sees give the audience a way of conceptualizing the Holocaust.

There is a quote attributed to Stalin: "a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." It is difficult to study the Holocaust because the scale of inhumanity is too immense. But in much the same way as Saul is able to channel his morality into a single vessel, Nemes is able to channel the pain and the anger and the confusion and the weariness and the fear that characterized Holocaust victims' experiences into a single portrayal. Nemes sought to give a voice to the voiceless, those who were not able to move forward from the Holocaust, those who never returned, and his striking narrative about a man crippled by his own morality is nothing less than a triumph.

Embrace of the Serpent Review

A few weeks ago, I went to see Embrace of the Serpent (2015) at the Laemmle Royale. It is set on and around the Amazon River and follows two explorers and their interactions with Karamakate, a native from a dying tribe. The film makes a powerful statement about colonialism on the region, but its most striking messages, sometimes wrapped in symbolism and others plainly visible, were about the death of the culture and the death of knowledge. Karamakate is the last of his tribe, and he learns that his god-given mission is to pass his knowledge on to the explorers.

The movie, much like the world, is full of ulterior motives, conflicting beliefs, humans acting without humanity. But the backdrop is the Amazon, and, like the world, it is beautiful nonetheless. I connected with the idea that the pursuit and the dissemination of knowledge is a holy quest. I empathized with Karamakate, who is reticent to give his knowledge to the first explorer. He is, after all, surrounded by the edifices of colonization, heavy-handed missionaries and rubber barons. But eventually, Karamakate finds the courage to share with the second explorer. Eventually, the second explorer gives up his ulterior motives. Eventually, the two can connect.

In the world, we strive for connection, but we struggle to overcome the obstacles that divide us: belief systems, politics, history, language. There are explorers the world today, trying desperately to preserve the cultures of native peoples before they are swept out to a sea of uniformity. Why? Because these people understand that our world is rich because it is diverse. These people understand that connection through homogeneity is hollow and fruitless. I see myself or my goal for myself in the explorer at the end, liberated from his goal of exploitation, open instead to understanding. I see my world in the jungle that surrounds him, teeming with understanding to be received.

It was very interesting to here the director speak afterward about the film, which was shot on a shoestring budget in very little time. All native peoples were played by actual native peoples. The movie represents a commitment to the preservation of culture and, as Colombia's first feature-film Oscar nomination, a resurgence of art and expression in a war-torn nation.