A thousand apologies to Peter. This one review from a couple days ago somehow managed to get into my junk e-mail while all the others have come with no problems.
Any new film about the Holocaust must be able to distinguish itself by virtue of a compelling undiscovered story or an unexplored perspective.
FATELESS has the benefit of a screenplay by Imre Kertesz from his first novel, published in 1975. (Kertesz won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002.) FATELESS has the benefit of gifted long-time cinematographer Lajos Koltai sitting in the director's chair for the first time. (Koltai has lensed everything from MEPHISTO to THE EMPEROR'S CLUB.) FATELESS has the benefit of a distinctive look. (In colloboration with Gyula Pados, who shot KONTROLL, Koltai bookends the film with colorful scenes that stand in stark contrast with the concentration camp sequences in which colors are steadily diminished to a sickly green.) FATELESS has the benefit of a fine musical score by Ennio Morricone.
What FATELESS doesn't have, finally, is much to set it apart from other Holocaust films. More on that in a moment.
The story begins in Budapest, Hungary. At the age of 14, Gyuri Koves sees his father taken away to a work camp. Soon thereafter, he too is rounded up along with other Hungarian Jews and held captive in a concentration camp. He is moved from camp to camp until he loses track of everyone he knows and is adrift in pain and suffering. By chance and his own stubborn will to live, he survives to the end of the war, only to return to a vastly changed Budapest where no one knows how to deal with a concentration camp survivor.
It is the last scenes of the film that are the most unsettling. Everyone who avoided the death camps also wants to avoid Gyuri; they've formed walls around themselves, composed of their own impressions of what it must have been like, and really don't want to hear any expressions to the contrary. The sight of the emaciated Gyuri walking about in his striped camp shirt causes strangers to scuttle away quickly.
Kertesz drew from his own experiences as a concentration camp survivor in writing his novel, and it seems likely that these latter scenes were greatly condensed for the film. But it is the attempt to reconcile the guilt of survivors -- both those who made it out of the camps and those who never went in -- that has been rarely explored cinematically, and it feels short-changed. By this time, images of concentration camp atrocities are burned into our collective consciousness. Anyone with an inclination to see this film is unlikely to be a Holocaust denier, so why not concentrate on this fresh perspective?
Because so much of FATELESS concentrates on reproducing the horrid conditions of the camps, it's difficult not to be weighed down with sadness at the inhumanity of man. Similarly, the spirit of young Gyuri Koves is beaten down until it hovers at the point of being extinguished. With the emotions of the viewer shaved so raw, that's the time to expand upon the themes that end up being touched upon only momentarily.
Marcell Nagy is painfully effective as Gyuri Koves. Daniel Craig, the future James Bond, has a bit part as a US soldier near the end of the film. Production values are top notch. The film has received a number of positive reviews, so be advised that mine is a minority opinion.
THINKFilm Company will release the picture in the US; New York and Los Angeles are first up on January 6, 2006, and it will roll out nationwide in February. Their web site is here.
FATELESS will be released in the UK by Dogwoof Pictures in March 2006; the web site is here and the trailer here.