Lajos Koltai's Fateless

Fateless, a Hungarian picture directed by the cinematographer Lajos Koltai and based on 2002 Nobel Laureate Imre Kertész's adaptation of his 1975 work of autobiographical fiction, is the first movie I've seen that grasps the problem that the Holocaust presents for narrative artists. Kertész based the book on his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944 and 1945 and the movie starts out conventionally enough focusing on Gyuri Köves (Marcell Nagy), a Budapest teenager who is the son of a prosperous merchant about to be transported to a forced labor camp. We see the father's last night in the well appointed apartment with his loving family and concerned neighbors; we hear the gossip about the state of the war and what's really happening to transportees, and some attempts to incorporate events into a Jewish understanding of existence. And at the margins we get an idea of Gyuri's sexual experimentation with a Jewish girl upstairs, who is considerably more rattled than he is by the Nazi racial laws. Gyuri is sensitive but a typical teenaged boy at the same time — the girl may seem hysterical but Gyuri's responses are a bit behind events. While still living at home he displays the middle-class adolescent moodiness typical of boys in ordinary times.

After his father is transported Gyuri leaves school to begin work in a factory with other Jewish boys. On his way to work the first day, however, a rogue Budapest policeman takes all the boys assigned to the factory off every bus that passes and holds them captive to await further orders. The policeman is frighteningly literal-minded about his duty, and perhaps mad, both of which make him an appropriate messenger to the other side: all the boys, and a few men as well, are sent off to KZ Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is where the movie really gets interesting.

Although we follow Gyuri from beginning to end, it is, in fact, the disintegration of the storytelling, mirroring the boy's own disintegration, that makes Fateless so distinctive. Having had to wear a yellow star in the streets of Budapest, Gyuri has already lost a sense of control over his destiny. But as he begins to starve in the camp and to lose his sense of propriety and his self-control, the movie, while still following him, begins to feel depersonalized. There's a hint of what's coming in a shot of some of the boys sitting in the shadow of the Birkenau crematoria and talking about another boy who failed the initial selection. The smokestacks and the louring sky make the crime against the Jews merge with the bad weather — it's an image of something amiss in nature and the boys are mere brushstrokes on the bigger picture. Later there's an amazing moment when Gyuri watches a Nazi guard eat and mimes the guard's chewing and swallowing, the closest he can come to a satisfying meal. This bit echoes the earlier dinner scene on his father's last night home when Gyuri was too upset to eat the food on his plate. Not only has adolescent petulance been starved out of him in the camp, but he's dissolving in some more fundamental way.