FATELESS
Directed by: Lajos Koltai.
Produced by: Andras Hamori.
Written by: Imre Kertész, based on his novel.
Director of Photography: Gyula Pados.
Edited by: Hajnal Sellö.
Music by: Ennio Morricone.
Released by: THINKFilm.
Language: Hungarian with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: Hungary/Germany/UK. 140 min. Not Rated.
With: Marcell Nagy, Áron Dimény & Daniel Craig.

In recently Nazi-occupied Budapest, Gyuri, a Jewish mop-topped 14-year-old, is warned by his father that his carefree childhood days are over - by decree, he will be forced to drop out of school and work in a factory. Before his father's deportation to a labor camp, Gyuri's extended family has one last meal together, with pork as the main course - the only meat available on the black market. Around the table, rumors of death are dismissed - "Poland is different." But an elderly relative reminds the boy that, as a Jew, persecution must be endured with patience and fortitude.

On his way to work, trusting Gyuri gets off the bus after a police officer demands all those wearing yellow stars to do so. Gyuri and other boys hide in the embankment, as ordered, while the police man rounds up more Jewish males. Even as they are being delayed to work, one boy reckons the policeman is just fooling around.

Nobel-prizewinning author Imre Kertész adapted the film from his novel; at 14, Kertész, like Gyuri, was deported to Auschwitz and transferred to other concentration camps. In this inevitable horror story, Gyuri learns what he calls the secret of the universe: having no control of his fate, he could be killed anywhere, anytime. And indeed it is through chance and a noble act from more than one Samaritan that keeps the emaciated boy alive.

Director Lajos Koltai has taken a few tips from another Holocaust drama, Roman Polanski's The Pianist, in the almost colorless cinematography, which becomes virtually black and white in the muddy camps. And like Adrien Brody in the Polanski film, the restrained performance of Marcell Nagy as Gyuri largely consists of observing (so much so that when Gyuri, at the war's end, says he can't be angry anymore, it's never clear that he ever was). The one exception is in the music. Ennio Morricone's hymn-like score sounds like it could have been lifted from his work in Cinema Paradiso as it aggressively underlines Gyuri's hope for survival.

Without downplaying the camps' brutality, the emphasis here is more on the psychological cruelty of deprivation and starvation. Koltai easily could have taken the film in another direction with a more hard-hitting tone, as in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (one grisly operation is offscreen). Instead, it is made up of evenly paced vignettes ending in a slow blackout, often as Gyuri stares passively toward the viewer. The emotional impact is muted in comparison to Schindler's List or The Pianist; but perhaps as insidiously as those films, Fateless' remarkable and somber images have as lingering an impact, which shouldn't be surprising considering this is the directorial debut of cinematographer Koltai (Mephisto and more recently, Malena.) Kent Turner
January 6, 2006