All the bodies (as they would have to be in any fictional film) are too well-fed and too healthy. There is a banal level at which representation is simply impossible. It is impossible, however, to watch the film without confronting the still burning critical issue of how one can represent the mass extermination campaign of the Nazis from 1942 onward. Nor have I any doubts about recommending that anyone who wants to see a great example of the seventh art get to a good cinema to see Son of Saul as soon as it is released. It is a long time, if ever, since I have seen a first-time film crackling with such cinematic intelligence.

There is to my mind almost no doubt that Nemes is a great director. I will not spoil the twists and turns in the plot, but suffice it to say that Nemes keeps you gripped in a manner quite unlike Bela TarrвЂ™s films. In the sonderkommandos, privileges and perks are for sale on a black market that is also harboring a plan to break out from the camps (this places the film in September 1944). Each gang has its bossвЂ™s name, and it is these bosses who deal directly with the Germans, who, like the victims, appear only on the edges of the screen. SaulвЂ™s search takes us into the heart of these sonderkommandos. It is simply that the right words must be said in the right order. There is no dwelling on Jewish identity, no sign of religious faith in SaulвЂ™s search. Saul recognizes the boy as his son, and the film then becomes the tale of his search to find a rabbi so that his child can be properly buried. But then miraculously there is a boy who lives much longer than he should after inhaling the Zyklon B gas, and the doctors decide to perform an autopsy to discover the reason for this hitch in the assembly line of murder.

So we are with Saul in a factory of death. What is at the center is the relentless pace of extermination-the extraordinary resources that the Germans devoted to the extermination of a people, as they were losing the war on both Eastern and Western Fronts. The horror is almost always just out of sight or on the very edge of our vision. So we see him at work: helping the victims out of their clothes, cleaning the ovens. The genius of the film is to make SaulвЂ™s point of view the spectatorвЂ™s only access to the camps. These were units of Jews who actually supervised the last moments of those about to be gassed, took out the bodies to be buried, and then cleaned the ovens for the next batch. Son of Saul is a film shot from the point of view of a member of a sonderkommando. Godard once said that the only way to make a film about Auschwitz was to make it from the point of view of a guard. However, given the intelligence and care of the rest of the film, I suspect that this polyphony gives it yet a further layer of historical complexity.

Indeed, there is a play of languages in the film-Yiddish, German, Hungarian, Hebrew-of which this Anglophone viewer caught only the slightest echoes. It is perhaps appropriate that it is a Hungarian who has made the most serious fictional effort to date to represent the hideous nature of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camps, because nearly 400,000 Hungarian Jews were killed at Birkenau, and it was directly to deal with these Hungarians that the train tracks were extended right into the Birkenau camp. He was Bela TarrвЂ™s assistant for two years, but although he shares his former bossвЂ™s sense of the cinema as frame and shot, he is also much more interested in narrative and drive. Nemes is quite obviously an enormously talented director. Indeed, in thirty years of attending this festival I cannot remember any other film that has sparked such long and detailed arguments. One film, however, has stood out from this company: LГЎszlГі NemesвЂ™s Son of Saul. This yearвЂ™s Cannes has tested this resolve to the limit with a succession of terrible and second-rate films. Finally, and on a more prudential note, people mind about bad reviews, so it is a very quick way of making a lot of enemies. Second, if you have ever had the luck to produce a film yourself, you are aware that any film that makes it to a public screen is a small miracle of energy and determination, and it is simply unkind to say that the miracle was a complete waste of time. First, it is bad for the soul to exult in pointing out the deficiencies of the film in question. It is one of my most strongly held critical beliefs that you should not write about films you donвЂ™t like.

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