Hungary
4.5*
Director:
Lajos Koltai
Screenwriter:
Imre Kertész
Director of Photography:
Gyula Pados
Running time: 140 minutes
Original title: Sorstalanság
If you have any sense of compassion, films about the Holocaust are very difficult to watch. And yet, the stories that they tell must be acknowledged and absorbed by a generation that could easily forget the events of more than 70 years ago.
At the time I am writing this review, I haven’t seen a Holocaust film, either fictional or documentary, since I sat down to watch Claude Lanzmann’s staggering multi-disc Shoah (1985) six years ago. Lanzmann and Alain Resnais, whose Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) is considered to be an equally impressive achievement reminding us of the need to remember, both constructed films of the Holocaust as reflections of the past that still have striking resonance in the present.
Fateless‘s main character, who features in every single scene and is somehow involved in every single shot, is Gyuri “Gyurka” Köves (played by Marcell Nagy), a teenage boy with a mop of curly black hair, who lives in Budapest with his father and stepmother, part of a Jewish community in Budapest at the beginning of the Second World War. First, his father is sent to a labour camp, and then he himself is picked from a bus and sent to concentration camps, where he stays for the duration of the war, along with thousands of other Jewish Hungarians.
The young actor playing Gyurka is perfectly cast: Exactly on the verge of adulthood, he conveys innocence without childishness, and sometimes he seems to look straight at us, engaging our sympathy without soliciting it. His ideas are still evolving, and during a conversation about the essence of Jewishness, he wants to comfort a girl he has a crush on, who doesn’t understand why being a Jew makes her the object of so much hatred, but he doesn’t quite have the experience to do that yet. It is a touching moment, despite the evident political slant (fortunately, the only time the film hammers home the point) and one that obviously relates to the film as a whole.
Fateless is beautiful. It is the debut film of cinematographer Lajos Koltai and is clearly the work of someone with an eye for visual impact. The film’s colours are very muted: Mostly, the images resemble sepia photographs, and often the colour scheme is almost completely monochrome, with only hints of colour in the frame, especially the colour yellow, which of course is the colour of the infamous Star of David badges sewn onto the clothing of the Jewish population.
The film’s many different moments are not filled with the horrors one usually associates with Holocaust films but add up to a very human portrait of the people in the concentration camps and their desire to support each other. The fragmentary nature of the narrative, especially in the second half, is not always entirely effective, but the fragments themselves are like small gems in the mud of the Second World War.
A few scenes stand out for the emotion they are likely to evoke and very often the soundtrack of Ennio Morricone (one of the best he has ever scored, with the always incredible Lisa Gerrard adding her voice to some very emotive pieces) plays a significant role. At one point, the prisoners are asked to entertain their fellow inmates, and they sing a song whose relevance to their plight is difficult to miss:
What does a girl dream on a moonlit night?
That her prince will come on a steed of pure white
It’s a dream so sweet, but soon she must wake
And princes are scarce, so it’s all a mistake
Fateless ends on a very different note from most of these kinds of films and may rub some people the wrong way, but the point that the film makes illuminates the human ability to find light in the darkness and to hold on to the goodness in some people and use it as a shelter against the dreadful acts of others.