Fateless

[Howard Schumann]

FATELESS (Sorstalanság)

Directed by Lajos Koltai (2005)

There have been many films about the holocaust but none quite as intimate and personal as Hungarian director Lajos Koltai's Fateless. Based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz, Fateless is a hauntingly beautiful film whose narrative unfolds in the form of miniature vignettes rather than peak dramatic moments. The film is seen from the perspective of 14-year-old Gyuri Koves (Marcell Nagy), who spent a year in Buchenwald during the last days of World War II and who provides the narration. Unlike most films about the holocaust, it suggests that happiness and beauty can co-exist along with deprivation and despair.

Marcell Nagy is outstanding as Gyuri, the young man who moves from a childlike innocence to world-weariness in the span of one year. With his soulful face and expressive eyes, he is almost a detached observer, quietly pondering his fate. He is, in the Sufi saying, in the world, but not of it and the film unfolds as in a lucid dream that blurs the lines between appearance and reality. Koltai captures this almost matter-of-fact quality as Gyuri says goodbye to his father (Janos Ban) who has been ordered to work in a Nazi labor camp. Because Hungarians did not feel the full brunt of Nazi persecution until the Nazi takeover in 1944, Gyuri thinks his father is just going to have to work hard and that nothing will happen to him. Neighbors and relatives who reassure him that everything will be all right do not further his grasp of reality.

When the boy and his friends are detained on a bus on the way to work, he learns quickly that "his carefree childhood days are now over". Still not comprehending the magnitude of what is taking place, he is annoyed but not frightened and does not seize the opportunity to escape offered by a friendly cop. Even when he arrives at Auschwitz, he sits on the ground shaven and wearing a striped uniform, talking with friends as if he was in a school playground during recess. When Gyuri discovers that "he could be killed at any time, anywhere", he attains a sort of spiritual freedom and his determination to survive is increased. Pretending to be sixteen, Gyuri escapes the gas chamber and is sent to Buchenwald and then to a smaller camp.

The scenes of murder, death, and dying at the camps are thankfully left to the imagination and the film focuses on Gyuri's personal reactions to what he sees around him. Koltai, a cinematographer for twenty-five years, creates a visual cinematic poem in which his color palette is so muted that we experience the mud and the atmosphere of cold and gray almost viscerally. Sadly, we watch Gyuri's transformation from the confident teenager we saw at the beginning to an emaciated number, his leg so swollen and infected that he can barely walk. In voiceover, however, he talks about the hours between work and the evening meal as one of quiet reflection and about the joy in discovering a piece of meat or potato in his soup. He is also sustained by a friend he develops in fellow Hungarian Bandi Citrom (Aron Dimeny) who protects him and tries to teach him the skills of survival. Bandi, ever the optimist, proclaims, "I will walk down Nefelejcs Street again"

One of the surprises in the film is the treatment Gyuri receives at what looks like a camp hospital. He is cleaned, allowed to sleep alone in a bed and taken care of, a set of circumstances not usually associated with extermination camps, yet based on Kertesz' actual experience. The most discussed aspect of the film, however, takes place in Budapest after the liberation. Gyuri feels more alone than he did at Buchenwald and even expresses a sort of homesickness for the camaraderie he felt at the camp. Friends and neighbors who were not in the camps cannot understand what it was truly like and Gyuri cannot explain it. Even if he could, no one really wants to hear anything that rattles their preconceptions.

He rebels at playing the role of the victim and says, "there is nothing too unimaginable to endure". When asked about the atrocities, he talks of his happiness. "The next time I am asked", he says, "I ought to speak about that, the happiness of the concentration camp. If indeed I am asked. And provided I myself don't forget". His "happiness", according to Kertesz, who also wrote the screenplay, is not a form of denial but an act of rebellion against those who do not see him any longer as a human being, only as a victim. It was a way of assuring his responsibility, of defining his own fate rather than having others decide it for him. For me, it also added a portal into the sublime.

GRADE: A

[Chris Knipp]

Am anxious to see this, which opened in NYC and was reviewed favorably in the Times the day I left in January; you've gotten to it first! Where'd you see it.

[Howard Schumann]

Originally posted by Chris Knipp
Am anxious to see this, which opened in NYC and was reviewed favorably in the Times the day I left in January; you've gotten to it first! Where'd you see it. Fateless opened in Vancouver last week.

[Chris Knipp]

That's great.

It's listed as showing in L.A. and Palm Springs, but no dates for here yet.

[Chris Knipp]

Concentration camp through the eyes of a teenage boy

Fateless (Sorstalanság ) grows out of a famous novel by 2002 Nobel laureate in literature Imre Kertész, based on his own experiences as a 14-year old Jewish boy from Budapest held in Nazi concentration camps toward the end of the War, released, and returned home.

When we first meet him, Gyuri Köves (Marcell Nagy) is sort of cool: tall, thin, self-possessed, with big puff-head hair -- rather like a young Bob Dylan.

We enter a world of confusion and denial which he is forced to inhabit. Gyuri is conscientious about keeping his Star of David showing as he walks home across a square, as if it's a point of sartorial pride. He doesn't know very well the Hebrew liturgy he's asked to repeat in his family, but he's not like the neighbor girl he fancies, who cries because she doesn't know what it means to be a Jew. Gyuri arrives to find his father deprived of his business and commanded to go off to "work camp." Gyuri's assigned to work in a factory and two elders -- a Kafkaesque pair, whom we'll meet again when the war's over -- argue vociferously over whether he should go to his job by bus or by train, as if that decision would resolve the whole predicament. The women are silently weeping, the men self-deceived hypocrites: or are they being brave?

Gyuri is detached and confident, up for trying a little smooching during an air raid. He's not a hero but he seems capable of thriving. Nonetheless he almost dies in the camps. In fact when he's back he says he's already dead. "Maybe I don't exist," he tells the girl he flirted with before.

Gyuri isn't taken away in a terrifying sweep like the Warsaw Ghetto sequence in Schindler's List; in fact, things continue to be Kafkaesque. He's pulled off a bus going to the factory and held up with some others by an inept cop who waits for orders, all at sea himself. The whole process of going to the camps seems like a series of bureaucratic snafus. Later Gyuri observes that there were many points where anyone might have escaped. (See Kafka's The Trial.)

A crucial point comes when a lot of boys are unloaded off the freight cars at Auschwitz and somebody warns them all to claim they're 16. A German soldier with the face of a cadaver thumbs Gyuri to the right, to work. A littler, bespectacled boy and an officious engineer who brags of his skills and his "perfect German" are sent left, to die. From Buchenwald Gyuri's sent to a smaller camp where there aren't even gas chambers and crematoria.

From then on the camp experience is a series of short sequences ending in blackouts, nightmarish vignettes that stay in the moment and avoid grand scenes -- except for the hanging of three escaped prisoners who've been caught. Characters emerge only to disappear in the chaos of camp life. A man who's just survived four years in a Soviet prison camp becomes Gyuri's protector and mentor, showing him how to horde bits of food and keep clean to avoid lice and disease.

But Gyuri eventually balks at this second level of control, lets himself fall prey to hunger and exhaustion, grows scabby and corpse-like and collapses with a swollen and infected knee. It's treated but then gets even worse and he's thrown on a pile of corpses, the undead among the almost dead and the already dead. Through this his voice-over comments on scenes that unroll for us. Sloughing through rain and mud, always cold, hungry, thirsty, the boy still sees a beauty in the twilight hour when they return from work, eat, and have a minute of peace in this stark hell-hole in which later he says they were happy, because things were simple and clear.

The young actor grew four inches during filmmaking and his voice changed. It's his deeper voice that narrates and tells us at the end about a nostalgia for this clarity and simplicity, for "the happiness of the camps" that no outsider ever knows about, and his physical transformation echoes the transformation of his character whose body is still a teenager's but whose mind is middle-aged.

Somehow the boy ends the war in a prison hospital that restores his strength. The most astonishing moments come when (resisting an American officer's advice to go to Switzerland, then to America) Gyuri returns to Budapest. Here he is back in town, ashen-faced, emaciated, sunken-eyed, scabby-lipped, in prison stripes, yet somehow firm and proud, on a Budapest trolley answering a man's questions, explaining to him that in the camp, beatings and starvation were all quite "natural." This and encounters with the would-be girlfriend and family and neighbors are the freshest of all the scenes in this beautiful, painful, eye-opening look at the Nazi persecution.

Director Koltai has long been a fine cinematographer and the visuals in Fateless are striking, the horrible smoke from the ovens lovely in the evening light, even as they make the young hero realize what it means and declare, "We are all going to die." This was the most expensive Hungarian film production ever but it's not showy. Kertész has his own dry take on his subject: "Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, where the European traveler arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history." The Holocaust isn't a unique event, Kertész insists in his Nobel lecture, nor is it a special Jewish one -- so much as an inescapable fact whose occurrence in a "Christian cultural environment" (in the words of Hungarian Catholic poet János Pilinszky) is a simply a "scandal." Showing the camps through the eyes of a pubescent boy who suffers but experiences beauty is essential to the cold neutrality of the author's viewpoint, and director Koltai has recreated things in a way that never feels manipulative. No tragic sweeping strings -- no tragedy at all; rather a mix of grim suffering and transcendence that takes you close to the experience, without letting you pretend that you've been there.

When someone asks Gyuri how he is when he's back he answers, "Very, very angry."

[Howard Schumann]

Beautiful review, much better than mine. This is one of the best reviews you've written, made the film come alive, even brought a tear to my eye. Congratulations.

[cinemabon]

Excellent reviews.... however, if it is anything like Schindler's List, watching people suffer in this manner is often an excrutiating experience.

Years ago, I acted in Peter Weiss' "The Investigation" taken from transcripts of the post-war crime trials. By the end of the four hour play we'd be lucky to have ten people left in the house. The testimonies were a burden on the soul.

I've been studying Buchenwald for my current novel. The commandant was a sadistic man ultimately put to death himself by the SS. Not for his cruelty, but for his stupidity! The camp was used mostly for labor. On the first day of opening, workers were strung out in a long line to a nearby quarry carrying large stones by hand back to the camp. If the SS thought you weren't carrying a large enough stone, you were shot. Some of the stones were used to build a road into the camp, labeled the 'road of blood' by the prisoners.

While I am certain this film is of the highest quality, watching it is another matter. By your reviews, this is not for the faint of heart.

[Howard Schumann]

Fateless is intense but it is not as graphic as some other holocaust films. Much of the story takes place in the boy's mind and it is very impressionistic. I didn't find it depressing.

[Chris Knipp]

You exaggerate your praise, Howard, actually I liked your review, the way you stated all the essential qualities of the film in the first few paragraphs. I might have covered a few more details but your review has more scope.

cinemabon, if I understood correctly, the voice-over tells us that after Gyuri was sent to Buchenwald from Ausxhwitz immeidtely, he was sent on to a smaller work camp, where there were no crematoria. So the sadisic procedure you describe may not apply to the camp where Gyuri, Imre Kertesz's alter ego, was held for most of his confinement. However I have not read the book... Of course any depiction of the concentration camps is bound to be disturbing, but I'm not sure that executions were left out or if they did not occur, or not often, in this location, though obviously a lot of people died of disease, starvation, and overwork, and Gyuri comes close to dying himself. His survival is a matter of luck.