“The sense of being lost is what we wanted to convey. That is what was missing before [in most earlier movies about the Holocaust]: one individual being lost.” —László Nemes to Andrea Gronvall, Movie City News
I assume this storytelling strategy is what led the New York Times‘s Manohla Dargis to describe the film, in a report from Cannes, as “radically dehistoricized” and “intellectually repellent”—attributes that I’d be more inclined to assign to the period bloodbaths of Quentin Tarantino (including his latest, also showing at Music Box). But Tarantino’s pop credentials seem to grant him a certain leeway denied to art movies. Dargis’s Times colleague A.O. Scott concluded his mainly respectful review by writing that Nemes’s “skill is undeniable, but also troubling. The movie offers less insight than sensation, an emotional experience that sits too comfortably within the norms of entertainment.” In some respects this dimly recalls Theodor Adorno’s famous 1949 statement—”To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”—albeit presumably revised to allow for the playfully impudent entertainments of a Tarantino, if not for the visceral art strategies of a Nemes, who plays for higher stakes.
Directed by László Nemes
