This time it is deeply personal for László Nemes, the Hungarian director who won an Oscar for his Auschwitz-set debut feature, Son of Saul. His latest film Orphan, which shadows a Jewish boy who yearns for his father’s return from the camps, mirrors the experience of the director’s own father.
Set in the country of Nemes’s birth and photographed beautifully on film - with the grain, painterly colour palate and, the director argues, the discipline that working on celluloid demands - the movie’s narrative exists in two aftermaths.
The first is a post-Holocaust period. True, it could be said we are still living in such an era. But with the prelude of Orphan set just four years after the war, the shock of the Shoah feels more immediate, like the echo of a gunshot.
This sense is powerfully conveyed by the film’s opening image of a grubby young boy, Andor, who is hiding in undergrowth. With his back to camera, his kippah is just visible in the gloom. Those who cared for him in the orphanage to which he had somehow been squirrelled during the war extract him from his lair and return him to his mother Klára (Andrea Waskovics). How she survived, hidden by a country butcher, emerges later and informs the rest of the film.
With mother and son back in their shabby Budapest apartment the narrative vaults to 1957, which brings us to aftermath number two. The Hungarian anti-Soviet uprising has just been brutally crushed by the communists. The city, still shattered from the war, is a ghost town. As the population eke a living, Russian troops and local police stalk the streets looking for revolutionaries.
Andor (played by the remarkable 12-year-old Bojtorján Barabas in his first feature) is now 12 and still waiting in vain for his father’s return from the camps. Meanwhile he plays among bomb sites with Sári (the equally assured Elíz Szabó), the daughter of another decimated Jewish family, and attempts to fill his father’s absence with visits to the synagogue. The apartment block’s boiler in the basement represents his dad in ways that only make sense to a child. But it is Berend the butcher who fills the space left by his absent father.
Played by the bullish French actor Grégory Gadebois, we learn that Berend was paid to save Andor’s mother from the Nazis. It is implied he forced her into his bed. Yet with the war over she does not reject his attentions.
Berend, who is superbly played by Gadebois, is terrifying. In his bearing and boorishness he is the opposite of what Andor imagines his Jewish father will be like when – increasingly if – he finally returns.
Yet director Nemes is less interested in creating monsters than in revealing the day-to-day struggle of living in the wake of two era-defining historical events. The film also serves as a rarely seen reminder of life under pitiless communist rule.
Here death may not have been compulsory for Jews as it was under the Nazis. But for those few who survived the everlasting light can only exist as a guttering flame.
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