Beautifully photographed and majestically scored, Fateless is a haunting account of one boy's experiences during the Holocaust and his journey to pick up the pieces in the war's aftermath.
Beautifully photographed and majestically scored, Fateless is a haunting account of one boy's experiences during the Holocaust and his journey to pick up the pieces in the war's aftermath.
One young man's devastating voyage through the Holocaust sets the stage for this powerful drama. Gyorgy "Gyurka" Koves (Marcell Nagy) is a 14-year-old Jewish boy living in Hungary when the Nazi pogroms begin sweeping through the country. Gyura's father (Janos Ban) has his business taken away from him not long before he's taken away to a concentration camp, and as he's led away, Gyura agrees to his father's request to look after his stepmother while he's gone. However, Gyurka takes a bus rather
than the train to work the following morning, believing it to be safer, but before it can reach its destination, police stop the vehicle and take the Jewish passengers into custody. Gyurka is sent to Auschwitz, but is later transferred to Buchenwald, and finally to Zeitz; at each stop the teenager is witness to greater and greater horrors, as different varieties of torture and violence are introduced with each passing day, until his emotions begin to wear away. When American troops finally liberate Zeitz, Gyurka has been shocked into a placid serenity, and when he returns to the wreckage that is Budapest, his ravaged body and ghostly calm go mostly overlooked by the other survivors attempting to rebuild. Sorstalansag (aka Fateless) was adapted from a novel by Imre Kertesz, a Nobel Prize-winning author who is himself a survivor of the Nazi death camps. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
A reflection of how its main character comes to experience reality, as one small moment between what came before and whatever horror or happiness is yet to come.
The film is on a level just slightly below Schindler's List and The Pianist, and only because Koltai is a less powerful, practiced director than either Steven Spielberg or Roman Polanski.
With its first-person approach, Fateless joins other classic films about the Holocaust (Shoah, Schindler's List) by vividly portraying an event that can seem remote as the number of eyewitnesses shrinks each year.
"Fateless" is an essential film in the canon of holocaust film because it vividly tracks the specific brand of hatred that torture and genocidal murder inures.
In cutting through the conventional cliches of Holocaust presentation to a more singular truth, Gyuri defies viewers to refuse him the license to tell his own story as he himself saw and felt it, rather than as others might prefer him to tell it.
Plays out as a constant tug-of-war between what makes it trite and what makes it unique, although what makes it unique has the better chance of sticking with you.
Is the survivor entitled to ordinary human happiness -- or is this human emotion an act of disloyalty and diminution? These questions are a vital part of this outstanding film's dark and sombre power.
We're meant to see the camps with a naive adolescent eye, but director Koltai misjudges his material, and his fastidious paletting and highly orchestrated set-pieces are curiously low-impact; beautiful where they should be beastly.
Fiercely unsentimental and surprisingly beautiful, Hungarian drama Fateless does the seemingly impossible: it succeeds in portraying the subject of the Holocaust in a new and devastating light.
This film is hard to watch, but the performances are profound and the cinematography is breath taking. The depths of suffering seem to be limitless, and thiis film portrays that brilliantly. I do not recommend this film for children. It is a mature work that is completely disturbing. While similar films capitalize on
the Holocaust brutality, this is a different perspective regarding the erosive effects of the endless, dehumanizing routine upon the psyche. How anyone was able to survive one of these camps, then return to normal society, is beyond me.
There can be beauty anywhere - even in the Nazi death camps. This film is filled with touching moments, some of the rawest I've seen in film, and is an interesting take on the coming-of-age story: what if you spent your teens in a concentration camp? How would you look back on it?
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