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Renowned cinematographer Lajos Koltai, whose more recent noteworthy
projects include Being Julia
and Malena, makes his directorial
debut with Fateless. The film presents a somewhat different story of the Holocaust
as experienced by a fourteen-year-old boy. It is based on Nobel-laureate Imre
Kertesz’s semi-autobiographical
novel about the fate of Hungarian Jews. Marcell Nagy plays Gyuri Koves, the
articulate, expressive, and perceptive son of a solidly middle-class Budapest Jewish
family. Fateless is a movingly and hauntingly subjective experience,
unapologetically presenting Gyuri’s story through his own mind’s eye. That the
sense he makes of his experiences are his own, uninflected by the later official Holocaust
history constructed in postwar hindsight, is what sets this film apart, adding another
thought piece to the collective understanding of what the Holocaust means.
Fateless met with some early criticism over its seeming lack of
careful historical contextualiziing, a vital dimension in most accounts, fictional or
historical, in recounting the demonization, ghettoization, physical removal, and
extermination of European Jewry under Hitler. Close followers of history will recall that
Nazi occupation came late to Hungary, only one year before the war ended. Thus, with
deportations starting in spring 1944, the deportation campaign was short-lived, somewhat
disorganized and far less than total. (This is depicted in Fateless.) Thus, too,
many Budapest Jews were never forced out of the capital and survived more or less intact
until the end of the war, up until the transfer of power to occupying Soviet Russian
forces. Gyuri Koves’s experiences and observations, and the particular conclusions
he comes to are deftly summed up in the film’s title—a philosophical
counter-response to the conclusion that the Holocaust was the fate of European Jewry;
Gyuri concludes, with a disconcerting equanimity, that his life, at least, has proven to
be "fateless."
Koltai divides his film into three acts. In the beginning, Gyuri is
a beloved, but not particularly exceptional teenager, living comfortably with his extended
family. He has typical social problems at school--with girls, and those arising from
family politics (stemming mostly from his father’s divorce and remarriage). As the
threat of Nazi occupation moves closer, family members respond in various ways--one person
in total denial that anything bad will happen, another petrified by all the rumors they
have heard. After a drawn-out sequence of dramatic farewell scenes, Gyuri’s father is
sent to a "labor camp." Soon Gyurki is picked up in a random sweep of busses
shuttling child laborers to an outlying factory, his life taking a radical and irrevocable
change. The strange visual beauty of Fateless emerges undeniably, as one striking
blue-and-silver art-deco work of art goes chugging through the barren late-autumn
landscape.
The second act finds Gyuri being moved from one concentration camp to
another, as conditions (physical and spiritual) progressively deteriorate. The
cinematography now figures prominently in the storytelling. Large, wet snow flakes fall
against winter skies, under labor camp flood lights, dancing across the camp grounds,
simultaneously magical, even joyous in their beauty, but oddly foreshadowing the
"black snow" (charred embers of human remains) often portrayed falling in poems
and films about the death camps.
The camera frequently sees through Gyuri’s eyes, intimately
blending moments of visual beauty (and evoked emotions of gratitude and tender mercies of
fellow feeling among the inmates) with the more brutishly ugly and cruel facts of their
existence. Moral tones visually stated in black-and-white shift, through specially
processed color film, so that prisoners’ faces fade into warm, pinkish tones, death
camp twilights fade into soulful, murky greens, billowing smoke enshrouds labor camp
factory buildings in stark, woodblock print-like settings. A solitary Allied bomb bursts
into brilliant orange flames, the color an almost cheerful reprieve from the
black-and-white, day-after-day drudgery of loading and unloading train cars of stones.
Eventually Gyuri is worked nearly to death and his fever-racked
skeletal body is tossed onto a cart, to be hauled off for cremation. As he lies looking
back at the camp upside down, he sees not so much the horror, but the world itself (the
world-as-itself, as the ever-philosophical Gyuri might argue), as if such things were
normal, the rule. As he is being carted off, he seems to feel not horror, but rather a
melancholic longing for that "special time" of each day, the relatively relaxed
mood during the inmates’ dinner break, which now he will be missing. Where the story
goes and what all of this could mean plays out in the third act, when Gyuri returns from
death, from the concentration camps, from the life that he, as a teenager, has come to
regard as normal. It is here, in the third act, and before the arrival of the Soviet
occupiers, that this film reveals its disturbing and sublime gifts.
- Les Wright
