AS a Hungarian Jew packs up for deportation to a Nazi work camp in 1944, a Jewish neighbor stops by with some parting advice: “Keep your chin down, old boy, and never lose your despair.”
Those words could be the motto of “Fateless,” or even of the Jewish people as the film sees them. Its crushing irony and sense of wonder about what it means to be Jewish are going to make it tough to beat in the race for the foreign-language Oscar, for which it is Hungary’s candidate.
It’s easy to overpraise a Holocaust drama; regardless of the weight of the subject, a film has to be original. But “Fateless,” which narrows its scope to the viewpoint of a 14-year-old Budapest boy named Gyuri (Marcell Nagy, carrying the film) who is taken from his parents and sent to a series of concentration camps, is so personal that it’s universal.
Working with a script by 2002 Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész, who adapted his autobiographical novel, rookie director Lajos Koltai (the cinematographer of “Sunshine,” an even more powerful film about Hungarian Jews and the Holocaust) steers away from graphic violence and limits the number of scenes with barking Nazis.
Instead, he paints with personal details. As Gyuri’s father is leaving for a work camp, the son is mainly interested in stealing a kiss from a pretty girl who lives in his building. “What about last night during the air raid?” he asks her urgently.
Friends who throw a goodbye party tell Gyuri’s father it’ll all be over soon, a line the Jewish characters repeat in several scenes. One fellow theorizes that the German camps are just a ploy to win concessions from the Allies: “Secret negotiations are under way,” he says. “This is completely reliable information.”
Irony is perhaps the sharpest tool in the artist’s box. The truth stands out more clearly, hits you harder, when it’s set off against such absurdity.
No Holocaust film can be hopeful or optimistic – not if it’s honest – but the film plumbs the meaning of Jewishness and finds something indestructible there. The idea comes across with immense grace in the film’s haunting central moment.
Row upon row of starved Jews made to stand at attention for hours begin to sway like willows, fighting to stay on their feet. Composer Ennio Morricone, who has not so much scored as created many indelible cinematic moments in such films as “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” rises to the occasion with an almost devotional theme that gives the images a poetic force. The Jews waver, they suffer, but they endure. Meanwhile, one of them tries to sell his fellow inmates a can of soup at a high price.
Many viewers will be repulsed by that touch – or by the scene in which Jews on a train to the camps try to trade jewelry for drinking water from a border guard, who complains that they “still want to turn the most sacred things into business.” But it would be facile and false to call Kertész a self-hating Jew.
Through the hollow eyes of Gyuri, he simply, wearily, observes humanity. When it’s all over and Gyuri heads home still wearing his striped prison uniform, an officious conductor nearly throws him off a train for not having a ticket. The conductor is just one of the film’s many bored functionaries who demonstrate that evil is not merely banal but prides itself on sticking to the rules and looks forward to its pension.
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FATELESS
[****] (Four stars)
Profound and majestic. In Hungarian and German, with English subtitles Running time: 136 minutes. Not rated (profanity, disturbing images). At the Film Forum, Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue.