Fateless
Written by Imre Kertész
Directed by Jajos Koltai
ThinkFilm
2006
Rating:


Attempting to find hope in the Holocaust in cinematic form is a dangerous thing, not just in terms of aesthetics but in terms of morality. As the written history of the Holocaust is quietly being overtaken by the filmed version of the event, the need to document one of history's worst atrocities in an accurate historical context has grown even as Holocaust movies have felt the need to become more palatable for mass consumption.

Consider "Life is Beautiful" (or, better, don't), a film that won two Oscars and was at one time praised, but has sense been reviled for its bad taste in turning a tragedy into a comedy for the sake of hopefulness. Even "Schindler's List," seen by many as the antecedent of the feel-good Holocaust movie, has been (wrongly) dismissed in some circles for its need to reassure.

In these terms, "Fateless" is something of an anomaly: it is a Holocaust film that dares to find hope and happiness in the heart of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and by doing so manages to make the terror of the camps far more palpable and far more heartbreaking. At once detached and intimate, pictorial and realistic, depressing and uplifting, "Fateless" not only rewrites the possibilities of what a Holocaust film can achieve, it challenges what any film can accomplish.

Based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winner Imre Kertész (who also wrote the script and based the story on his own experience in the Buchenwald concentration camp), "Fateless" opens in 1944 Hungary. Though a member of the Axis powers, Hungary was one of the last countries to send its Jews to the concentration camps because they had thoroughly assimilated into the country. So when 14-year-old Gyuri Köves (Marcell Nagy) says goodbye to his father when the man is "called up" to work at a labor camp, there's little fear that something terrible is about to happen. When Gyuri is pulled off a bus on his way to a wartime job, the policeman has no idea why and plays with Gyuri and the other children. The adults who have been detained, meanwhile, are merely annoyed.

Director Jajos Koltai documents Gyuri's increasingly harrowing journey with a striking visual palette that's astoundingly restrained in its artistry. Koltai and cinematographer Gyula Pados' photography is initially so crisp in its depiction of an autumnal Hungary that the country almost seems sunburnt. By the time Gyuri emerges from his ordeal, the world has turned to ash.

Gyuri and other Jews travel in cattle cars, a familiar scene, but here a sense of fear is replaced by boredom. Koltai beautifully photographs the journey with snow drifting into the car. Later, Koltai manages a startling image wherein inmates forced to stand in the yard as punishment slowly sway, creating a wave-like effect as their black-and-white uniforms move back and forth.

Koltai, an acclaimed cinematographer for István Szabó ("Sunshine," "Mephisto") who's making his directorial debut, has an eye for images, but he never turns the Holocaust into a snowglobe like "Memoirs of a Geisha" does to Japan. The overwhelming sense of horrifying, institutionalized irrationality and Nagy's miraculously expressive performance are too raw to allow that to happen.

As a prisoner at Auschwitz and then Buchenwald, Gyuri has his head shaved and his once cheery face slowly turns skeletal. His immersion into the concentration camps sparks an existential crisis. At home in Budapest, Gyuri once brushed off a schoolmate's pondering of what it means to me a Jew; in the camps, he's rejected by some of the inmates for not being Jewish enough. Gyuri resists having his identity defined by what the Nazis do to him, but faced with starvation, the boy discovers what he's capable of. Gyuri reaches a low when he shares a bed with a friend in a medical ward. When the friend dies, Gyuri feels sadness for only a moment before realizing he can conceal his friend's death and eat the dead boy's meals.

Yet, there are moments when Gyuri finds real happiness in the camps. He spends every day looking forward to the magical hour of meal time, and he even finds a man who acts as his caretaker, picking up Gyuri when he falls and helping the boy avoid the wrath of the guards.

Once he's sent back into the world when the war is over, Gyuri is ignored by the gentile Hungarians because to acknowledge him would be to admit the horror they allowed to happen, while the surviving Jews greet him as one would welcome a ghost.

When asked to compare the camps to hell, Gyuri replies, "I can't imagine hell, but the camps were real." Even so, Gyuri can't help but feel homesick as he's sent out to wander the streets of Budapest alone, promising to tell others of the happiness of the camps if he doesn't forget it. That's an extraordinary ending, and the simple daring of it puts "Fateless" into the upper canon of Holocaust films.

Posted Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/fateless