“Fateless” Directed by Lajos Koltai THINKFilm,
Inc.
Rather than encompassing the universal experience of World War
II or the Nazi concentration camps, “Fateless” focuses
on Gyuri Köves, a teenager from Budapest who is separated from
his family and sent to work at a camp in Buchenwald, Germany.
Holocaust films have traditionally placed a heavy emphasis on
realism, and in this respect Hungarian director Lajos Koltai
succeeds. Koltai insisted on real sets instead of special effects
when replicating the austerity of the setting, which creates the
feeling of a documentary. The screenplay was adapted by Nobel
laureate Imre Kertész, from his first novel of the same title.
The story is semiautobiographical and the firsthand accounts lend
stark reality to the narrative. Marcell Nagy, who plays Gyuri,
agreed to a starvation diet for his role, and the physical
transformation is both moving and repulsive. The film puts its
audience in the middle of an unimaginable experience, but does not
trivialize that experience by trying to capture every aspect of it.
The focus on Gyuri’s life gives both direction and
personality to the film. When Gyuri befriends Bandi, another man in
the camp, for example, the two of them experience something close
to happiness, which seems paradoxical given their situation. Gyuri
carries with him an outlook that allows him to understand his
captors and, in a personification of Stockholm Syndrome, almost
forgive them. He cannot, however, understand his former friends and
neighbors once he returns home to Budapest, who tell him to put his
past behind him. He seems to be almost homesick for the camps,
still wearing the clothes that identified him as a prisoner. Koltai
is a renowned cinematographer and the film is imbued with a sense
of richness of image, despite the bleakness of circumstance. The
color seems to drain out of the film as the war escalates, possibly
symbolizing the death toll of the camps. The combination of
innovative cinematography and concentrated storytelling allows the
movie to move beyond its history. Rather than being solely about
the Holocaust, “Fateless” is a story about growing up,
yet not forgetting the past that one leaves behind to become an
adult. World War II is not a peripheral event; it is clearly at the
heart of the movie, lending the sentiments that often accompany it
to the people who populate the film. However, the movie seems to
want to teach its audience to view the war differently, or view
anything so devastating differently, and to empathize with the
experience of the people involved. Gyuri’s release is not
only cathartic for the audience, it is also the turn of a new
chapter in his life. However, like any book, the next chapter
depends on the previous one ““ a point this film makes all too
clear.
““ Ana Heller