Fateless

Last night I saw this movie with an old friend of mine who just called me out of the blue. We usually only see each other to go to SIFF each year or if theres an exceptional foreign film we've heard around. We saw Fateless or Sorstalanság. Its centered around the life of a young Hungarian Jew named an Gyuri and based on a true story. After the movie my buddy told me that this was based on a book by an Imre Kertész the book recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. It was excellent in a completely different way than standard Holocaust films.

All of the scenes sit in this murky grey or brown color. I suppose this is the sadness and landscape that only Eastern Europeans can promote. Where most Holocaust films like Shine or Schindler's List have an inspiring tone to them in the face of adversity Fateless has an almost nihilistic aspect to it. The realism of it is a bit stinging where you see awkward scenes of one person crying as a friend is forced into a labor camp and all the others are blank faced at the experience. In many instances where there are expressions of human feelings, the scenes are abrubtly cut without developing; signalling, you already know whats going to happen and its pointless to continue anyways. Gyuri goes to Auschwitz, Buchenvald, Mauthausen, and at one point decides to give up on trying to live, they show him getting hauled away like a sack as his eyes glass over at the obscene black nightmare around him.

Overall, the film was poignant without being romantic. There were dozens of scenes where a normal film would have a score to understate a moment, Fateless does not. Making something on this event in the style they did is difficult to do without coming off as insincere. This movie was more true to me about the experience of Jews before and after the concentration camps. It strips away idealism which often is the end theme of a Holocaust film and shows the boy going home to Budapest skinny, pale, broken, and detached from society while at the same time awakened to the idea he was always free because anywhere anytime he could die. The film also covers different facets and personalities of the Jewish experience with some of the characters: an inspiring comrade, a hopeful father, the desperate, the devout religious, and the walking dead; each of these seemed somewhat futile against the immensity of reality.In the final 15 minutes after liberation from Americans, Gyuri does not decide to follow the dream of the USA. Back in Budapest, too tired to walk from his camp injuries a compassionate Hungarian man on a streetcar questions him on the horrors of the camps. At each inquiry about gas chambers, torture, and starvation he responds that each of these "naturally" happenned; and when asked how he feels he gives one word: HATRED.

This film is showing at the nice little local neighborhood Crest Cinema Center in Shoreline for $3 until Friday. They're one of the few places beyond the U-District that shows arthouse indie films.