FATELESS (Sorstalansag)

Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
THINKfilm
Grade: B
Directed by: Lajos Koltai
Written by: Imre Kertesz
Cast: Marcell Nagy, Bela Dora, Balint Pentek, Aron Dimeny,
Peter Fancsikai, Zsolt Der, Andras M. Kecskes, Dani Szabo,
Tibor Mertz
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 12/12/05

They say that war is hell. If so, how come so many soldiers
return home dreading the boredom of their mundane jobs
shelving canned peaches at the local A&P or clerking for
peanuts at Wal-Mart? The fear of death, the close relationships
of the men and women under fire in foreign lands, make for a
camaraderie without equal, and while relatively few enlist for a
second tour of duty, many remember their years abroad as a
time of heightened living.

Maybe, then, it's not so unusual for those unfortunate enough to
be Jewish in most of Europe during the early 1940's to think of
their days in Nazi concentration camps as a time of closeness.
Their incarceration prompts necessary alliances with others who
not only dig rocks and haul heavy sacks, sleeping just inches
apart on the hard, wooden racks that serve as bedding. It's
doubtful that even one person who survived the camps would
choose to enlist for another such experience: never again. Yet
Lajos Koltai's somber film, "Fateless," or by its Hungarian title
"Sorstalansag", shows the dreary, dark and miserable months of
living in Buchenwald as a time that the men behind the barbed
wire stuck together, sometimes even sharing the miserly rations
of bread and watery soup.

Based on scripter Imre Kertesz's 1975 novel, "Fateless," takes
us first into the cobble-stoned streets of Budapest in 1944.
Jews in Hungary were step-by-step being shorn of their rights,
suffering in their professional life by laws restricting their
numbers. However, it was not until May 1944 that people who
registered as Jews were gathered into ghettos and sent to
concentration camps including the worst of all, Auschwitz.

To project the anguish of Hungarian Jewry during a time that the
Nazi puppet government in Hungary known as Arrow Cross
administered the Magyar land, director Koltai's
cinematographer, Gyula Pados, focuses his lens on the central
character. He is a fourteen-year-old boy from Budapest, Gyuri
Koves (played by the 15-year-old eighth grader Marcell Nagy),
a typical teen in his country's sophisticated capital who like
many others of the Jewish persuasion is secular. Like some
German Jews of the time, he considered himself first to be a
citizen of his country. Without understanding the reasons–what
normal person could?–he observes his father's last hours
before the older man would be sent into a forced-labor camp.
Not long thereafter, Gyuri, wearing a yellow star, is hauled off a
bus and deported to Buchenwald, a healthy young man with a
huge clump of hair on his head. In a short time, he is reduced
to an emaciated, sore-infested inmate who develops a
gangrenous wound on his knee.

He bears witness to what no man or woman should ever have to
do. Sadism is rampant, and the jobs designed to wear the
prisoners to death–shoveling rocks and hauling sacks–are as
meaningless as the hours that the men are required to stand
still. In the film's most wrenching scene, the entire fellowship of
unfortunates, standing still in the sun, adopt various, heart-
rending positions: some sway back and forth, others bend
backwards at steep angles as though posing for perverse
statues. When the camp is ultimately liberated by American
soldiers headed by an army sergeant (a delightful cameo by
Daniel Craig), the American non-com officer takes a liking to
Gyuri and urges him to go to the States for his education. Gyuri
misses his opportunity. He returns to Budapest to find his home
taken over by others, shunned by people in the bus, and
embarrassing to a small circle of Jews who had hidden during
the deportations eager to move ahead without dwelling on the
past.

George Clooney may have had fun putting on thirty pounds for
his role in "Syriana," but no such pleasure fell upon young
Marcell Nagy, who comes across as a healthy, strapping boy,
reduced in months to a soulless skeleton who has lost his
humanity, While Nagy performs his role exquisitely, the film
itself looks like a college course, Holocaust 101, designed for
people who were born long after those dreadful years and
knowing little about what happened in the not-so-distant past.
The dialogue is didactic, written by Imre Kertesz as a verbal
textbook to inform the audience step by step, into the politics of
sadism and widespread murder.

Scenes in the concentration camp are in black-and-white, while
views of Budapest during the miserable days of World War II
are done in shades of brown. Color is added as the lad's future
brightens. This was not a pleasant time, certainly not part of the
"innocence" that people believe is true of anything that
happened before the radical years beginning in 1968.

"Fateless" is Hungary's entry into the 2005 Oscar competition,
having made the rounds of festivals including on in Berlin,
where it was apparently taken to heart.

Rated R 140 minutes © 2005 by Harvey Karten
harveycritic@cs.com Member: NY Film Critics Online