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Fateless

2005, Movie, NR, 140 mins

Fateless: Review

FATELESS
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Acclaimed Hungarian cinematographer Lajos Koltai's directorial debut is an uncompromisingly explicit and emotionally wrenching adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning writer Imre Kertesz's Holocaust novel Fatelessness. Nazi-occupied Budapest, 1944. As his father (Janos Ban) prepares for forced relocation to a German labor camp, 14-year-old Gyuri Koves (Marcell Nagy) is pulled aside by an elderly uncle (Peter Haumann) and given a warning: With his father's departure, Gyuri's days of childhood innocence will have come to an end, and he must now share the fate God has seen fit to mete out to all Jews, one which they must accept with humility and forbearance as they await His mercy. The coming year, however, will test the reasonableness of this belief as Gyuri begins to see that what passes for "fate" is really a random series of events that depend more on blind chance than divine design. The events are triggered the morning Gyuri is asked by a Hungarian policeman to disembark from the bus that takes him to the oil plant where he's been forced to work for the war effort. Told that all Hungarian Jews will eventually be relocated to German labor camps, Gyuri and hundreds of other Jews who've been similarly detained actually volunteer to leave, and embark on a long, tortuous journey that will eventually take them to Auschwitz and Buchenwald during the darkest days of the Final Solution. When he eventually returns to Budapest, Gyuri is met with indifference — and worse — from his former neighbors, while those Jews who didn't share his "common fate" urge him to resume his life as if the past year were only an unreal nightmare from which he now needs to awaken. Writing his novel entirely from the first-person perspective of an adolescent boy, Kertesz, who was actually imprisoned at Buchenwald as a teenager, was able to bring a fresh perspective to an otherwise now-familiar narrative voice. As horrifying as it sounds to us, Gyuri first sees his deportation as an adventure away from the ennui of a troubled family life, but he soon finds it difficult to reconcile such unnatural horror with his still underdeveloped sense of what's natural in the world. In adapting his novel for the screen, Kertesz makes sparing use of the voice-over that could have helped elucidate Gyuri's inner journey, but whatever isn't explicit in the dialogue is implicit in Gyula Pados' stunning cinematography. With its increasingly dusty winter palette and a painterly sense of lighting and multifigure composition, this exceptional film features some of the most beautiful cinematography ever seen on film, in service of some of the most horrible images imaginable. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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