Fateless (Sorstalansag)
Is it possible to get Holocaust fatigue?
Well, no, of course, it isn't -- ``never forget" is precisely the point. But after ``The Pianist" and ``The Grey Zone," ``Schindler's List" and ``Life Is Beautiful," a viewer might be forgiven for feeling a touch of Holocaust-movie fatigue.
This is a genre whose architecture has become horrifyingly familiar over the years and is in danger of becoming numbingly so. The trains, the smokestacks, the piles of cast-off belongings signifying cast-off human beings -- when does necessary commemoration turn into cinematic cliche?
``Fateless" brings something new to the table: an astringent lack of sentimentality that forces darker philosophical issues to the foreground.
Based on the 1975 novel by the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz -- a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner -- the film coolly observes the passage of its 14-year-old hero, Gyuri Koves (Marcell Nagy), from Budapest middle-class complacency through Auschwitz and beyond. He survives not as a stronger (or weaker) person or a better (or worse) Jew but rather as an existential cog in life's unfathomable machine. Knowing this provides not a whit of comfort.
Gyuri is hardly a hero when ``Fateless" opens. On the contrary, he's a normal teenager, more interested in necking with the pretty girl next door (Sari Herrer) than in the noose that's closing around Budapest's Jews. The yellow star sewn on the boy's jacket means nothing to him; when he prays in Hebrew, he worries in passing that he doesn't understand the words he's saying to God. An uncle tells Gyuri that he's ``part of the common Jewish fate," but he might as well be speaking gibberish.
Anyway, Gyuri considers himself more Hungarian than Jewish, and Hungary won't go the way of Poland, will it? His passivity is his strongest trait, outlasting his father's deportation to a labor camp and his own rounding up in a faceless bureaucratic ``ID check" that ends with a train trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Early in the journey, Gyuri has a chance to melt into the crowd and escape; a soldier even gives him the go-ahead with an imperceptible nod. The boy lets the moment slip, either because he's stupid or dully obedient or because he simply doesn't care.
``Fateless" sidesteps the standard dramatic beats of Holocaust movies. We skip over the revelation of the gas chambers and instead go straight to the prisoners' crushed acceptance of their situation. The film presents the human mind's ability to deal with mass extermination as binary: First, there is deluded optimism -- the women putting on their lipstick as the trains pull into the death camps -- and then there is the pit.
Gyuri is eventually shipped to a smaller camp, where he's put to hard labor and slowly wastes into a ghost. Lajos Koltai -- a celebrated cinematographer (``Mephisto," ``Being Julia") making his directing debut -- gives us the petty factions, the friendships and enmities, the desperate survival techniques, but ``Fateless" comes down to one boy's will to live and, ultimately, to his wondering why he should even bother.
This isn't a message to soothe the heart, clearly. Moviegoers hoping for a triumph of the spirit will find their sleep disturbed by Gyuri's watchful, empty eyes, and perhaps by the surreal beauty Koltai finds in the camps. ``Fateless" comes perilously close to aestheticizing the Holocaust, not because the director has an eye for the artful shot or because Ennio Morricone's score keens so lusciously but because beauty and death seem equally random here.
Gyuri survives -- we know he must, since death-camp movies are about bearing witness -- but his passivity is now a moral stance for having come through the fire. Again he has a chance at post-war freedom and again he lets it slip; the American officer (Daniel Craig) shrugs and says, ``OK, it's your life." And so it is. In Budapest, well-meaning survivors quiz him about his experiences, and their questions strike him as obscenely shallow. ``Was it very dreadful?" ``Did you learn what it means to be a Jew?" ``What do you feel now that you're home?"
Gyuri has an answer to that: ``Hatred." ``Fateless" looks man's inhumanity to man square in the eye and pronounces it standard operating procedure, and that may be the greater horror.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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