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When I sat down with the Hamptons International Film Festival’s lineup last week and picked out a few titles I wanted to see, I had no idea my three selections would share a common thread: the Holocaust.
With “Son of Saul” beginning in 1945, “Experimenter” in 1961, and “French Blood” in 1985, the three films, although unrelated in plot, unfolded sequentially. The first shows a man forced to burn bodies in the industrial hell of Auschwitz. The second presents a psychologist who sets out to understand why men and women blindly obeyed their superiors to commit genocide. The third follows a French Neo-Nazi youth through France’s right-wing conservative nationalist movement.
I couldn’t help but see it as a warning: History can, and will, repeat itself.
Director László Nemes stunned audiences at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year with his debut feature film, taking home the Grand Prix prize.
“Son of Saul” certainly lives up to its hype, catapulting viewers into the manic chaos of the final days of Auschwitz’s death factory through the eyes of a prisoner forced to clean up the remains of his own people. Tight closeups and long-winded handycam follow shots create a claustrophobic atmosphere as Saul, portrayed by masterful newcomer Géza Röhrig, tries to bury a boy he believes to be his son. Defying what has become a banal genre depicting one of the world’s worst atrocities, “Son of Saul” is not a film about the Holocaust but a short-lived journey of a man desperately seeking morality among evil.
Over the past 40 years, Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments spawned countless films and television episodes emulating his findings about human susceptibility to authority. However, “Experimenter” is the first to give the Yale University psychologist the full Hollywood bio-drama treatment.
Peter Sarsgaard continuously breaks the fourth wall as Dr. Milgram invites viewers into his calculated perception of the world around him. Early scenes captivate as he tests his subjects in the eerily sterilized world of a 1960s testing facility. Director Michael Almereyda took a risk with the interspersing of antique, still-photo backdrops, which sometimes fell flat due to a stark shift of aesthetic.
On the surface, the film documents Dr. Milgram’s descent from highly ranked professor on the verge of tenure to a caricature of his former self. At its core, though, it conveys a deeper message about a man’s attempt to shed light on the psychology behind human atrocities.
In what some are calling France’s “American History X,” a nation’s violent trail of racial animosity is revealed. The unrelenting film follows Marco, a Neo-Nazi skinhead, over a 30-year period as he evolves from a raving teenage fascist to a man of penitence.
Writer-director Diastème holds back nothing as Marco and his cohorts sadistically beat and humiliate minorities and duel opposing gangs, sometimes leading to their own bloody demise. The gore risks being dubbed gratuitous but serves its purpose as a fragment of the film’s hyperreality.
The film is both an unsettling reminder of France’s far-right conservative nationalist movement, and a detailed character study of a man’s divergence from a world of hatred while sacrificing the comforts of community.
on Oct 13, 2015