Beyond the Multiplex

"Fateless": My summer vacation in Buchenwald
There have been so many cinematic presentations of the Holocaust that, with the event itself receding beyond the reach of living memory, it's in danger of becoming historical porn, an exotic atrocity we consume over and over again for increasingly dubious reasons. Lajos Koltai's magisterial, understated "Fateless" avoids that trap; this is a grand claim to make, but I think it's one of the greatest of all Holocaust films. In focusing on the destiny of one young Hungarian boy, a survivor of the camps who never seems to understand quite how much he has lost at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, "Fateless" conveys on a visceral, intimate level what it was like to live in those terrible places.

As young Gyuri Köves (Marcell Nagy) tells one of his old neighbors after his return to Budapest, the camps were not hell. "I can't imagine hell," he says. "But the camps were real." Gyuri is the hero of Imre Kertész's semi-autobiographical novel, and while Kertész has been criticized in some quarters for what's perceived as an overly benign portrait of life in Buchenwald, I think that's a gross misinterpretation.

"Fateless" is a riveting and heartbreaking depiction of a pleasant, even ordinary childhood transformed to nightmare. As Gyuri gradually descends into a brutalized, half-dead animal condition in his odyssey to Buchenwald and back, I pressed my nails into my palms, and several times had to remind myself to breathe. If Gyuri thinks of the final hour of the day at Buchenwald, when the grueling forced labor is over and the inmates are permitted to wander about, eat and chat, as actual happiness, well, so do we. Isn't that natural? Human beings, in any context, will take such happiness as they can find, and Gyuri's increasingly desperate attempts to make a normal life in impossible circumstances are his only hope for survival.

In some ways, the very ordinariness of the Holocaust as we experience it in "Fateless" only accentuates the underlying horror. When Gyuri and a bunch of other Jewish kids his age are hauled off a factory bus and held for deportation, the policeman detaining them is a cheerful character who plays children's games with them. During the forced march through the streets of Budapest to the waiting cattle trains -- a scene we've all seen before, although here it has all its old, dreadful power -- this same cop catches Gyuri's eye for a second and gives him a little flick of the head: Get out of here, kid.

Unlike the brash young Pole played by Adrien Brody in Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" (a peculiar and, to my mind, overrated picture), Gyuri lacks the confidence for this moment. He's a bright, shy boy from the dusty, polite middle class of Hungary's highly assimilated Jewish population -- wonderfully captured by Koltai in the first third of the film -- and like a lot of European Jews, didn't think anything really bad was likely to happen to him. (Persecution directed against Hungarian Jews was relatively mild until the Nazi takeover in March 1944, and far more Jews survived there than in the rest of Eastern and Central Europe.)

So a few days after the kindly cop tries to save him, Gyuri is sitting on the ground at Auschwitz with a small group of his friends. Their heads are shaved and they're wearing their new striped uniforms, and they're talking matter-of-factly about those in their trainload, too old or too young for the labor camps, who were sent straight to the gas chambers. Their one friend was a geek -- he was irritating, he wore glasses, he acted too Jewish, they say. But they'll still miss him. Before them stand the crematoria in rows, belching black smoke into the sky. That scene might be harder to take than anything in "Hostel."

Although relatively new to directing, Koltai is one of Hungary's (and the world's) leading cinematographers, having collaborated for 23 years with the great István Szabó and having shot several Hollywood films. So this is a big, beautiful, expensive production, shot in wide-screen format in a lustrous range of murky blues and grays. The Auschwitz and Buchenwald sets built for the film were nearly as big as the camps themselves (there are also impressive scenes in the wreckage of Dresden and the bombed-out areas of Budapest), and the score is one of Ennio Morricone's most powerful in years.

But "Fateless" is also an example of how to spend that money; there are some masterfully staged, indeed unforgettable, crowd scenes here -- made to stand up all night as punishment for some infraction, the Buchenwald inmates sway, bend and snap, like stalks in a field of wheat -- but the heart of the film is Marcell Nagy's extraordinary performance as the ever more skeletal Gyuli, and the fragile threads of relationship he weaves with other inmates, never knowing which of them will die next, or how. When a spirited kid he knows from Budapest, a kid who's always smoking a cigarette, crawls into bed with Gyuli one night and never wakes up, we can see a flicker of emotion -- sadness, maybe, or just revulsion -- go across Nagy's face. But his next thought is how long he can pretend the kid is sleeping, and therefore eat his rations.

"Fateless" is both a caution and a warning, and those aren't the same thing. In depicting how suddenly and completely Gyuli's world is destroyed, and the terrible energy the Nazis devoted to their project of extermination, it should remind us that the word "fascism" is not to be thrown around lightly. That's a caution. But like Gyuli and his friends, suddenly plucked from their comfortable lives and thrust into the ashes of Auschwitz, most Europeans of the 1940s didn't notice what had happened to their continent until it was too late. And that's a warning.

"Fateless" opens Jan. 6 in New York and Jan. 27 in Los Angeles, with other cities to follow.

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