So I’m filing this piece on Fateless, an affecting yet
unsentimental portrait of one boy’s journey through the horrors of the Auschwitz
concentration camp, as both a first-run film and DVD review, because the bulk of it was written for IGN, but never posted there. Go figure. To wit:

Hungary’s
official Academy Award entry in the Best Foreign Language Film category last
year, and the deserving winner of a slew of international festival prizes, Fateless is the directorial debut of cinematographer Lajos Koltai,
who gorgeously captured admitted lookers Monica Bellucci and Annette Bening in Malena and Being Julia, respectively. So the film captivates most immediately
with its image, certainly. (The Heart of
Me’s Gyula Pados, serving here as director of photography, should also
garner special credit and mention.) Drained subtly and almost completely of color
as it progresses, Fateless possesses
a painterly bleakness that artfully parallels the slow-building emotional
devastation on display in the narrative, recalling the paintings of Peter
Breugel or the wartime photographs of Roger Libner.

It’s the central, haunted performance of young Marcell Nagy,
however, and the movie’s quiet, steely commitment to the collective quotidian
experiences of deportment and detainment that so effectively hold your
attention. Set in 1944, as Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” policy sweeps across
Europe, novelist Imre Kertész’s semi-autobiographical screenplay centers on
14-year-old Gyuri Köves (Nagy), a young, metropolitan Jew who’s never felt
particularly connected to his religion but who finds himself nonetheless swept up
in the mass deportations of Budapest. When the mild irritations of restriction
and impingements on personal freedom — which Gyuri views as indicative of a
general hatred of Jews, and not something he at all takes too personally — give
way to expatriation, Gyuri finds himself sent to Auschwitz.

Slowly coming to terms and grappling with, as he puts it,
the knowledge that he could be killed “at any time, any place,” Gyuri
cultivates a dignified, swallowed and somehow soulful alienation. Scenes in
which he witnesses bartering with a Hungarian for water on the eve of their
deportation and, later, pantomimes eating — almost unconsciously mimicking a
German guard — in an effort to stave off hunger, are notable for the manner in
which they innately humanize the horrors of the Holocaust.

Fateless also draws
certain parallels to another tale of undue adolescent woe, Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Though obviously their
scales and settings are vastly different, the narratives are similar in that
each story locates and seizes upon a certain choked humanity amidst the anguish
and wretchedness inflicted upon their protagonists. In fact, Fateless is indisputably the more
optimistic of the two pieces. It’s not a movie of declamatory conflict and drama,
of shrill, heart-rending goodbyes and mothers and children ripped apart. Rather
— in what was almost certainly a more common deportation experience — Fateless shows Gyuri quietly hugging his
father goodbye and debating with two bickering relatives whether or not the
train or bus offers the most direct path for report to Auschwitz.

As its miseries mount, the sense of panic Fateless induces builds naturally, yet
so too does the sense of awed hope it instills. Gyuri and many of his fellow
prisoners are bowed but not broken. Fateless
locates compassion in the worst sort of circumstances, and thus stokes the fire
of hope in humanity, which is never a bad thing. At two hours and 20 minutes,
it’s a grueling journey, but a rewarding one.

Fateless arrives
on DVD in a 4:3 letterbox presentation, and its transfer is a gorgeous one, preserving
the epic scope and evocative, stylized palette of Koltai and Pados’ stirringly
beautiful visual work. The image is clear and free from grain, and the movie’s
many fade-ins and outs (a device which Koltai likens to novelistic chapters)
achieve consistent blacks before returning us to the next scene. Examining the
inconsistency of skin tones here is not only pointless but counter to the
entire enterprise, since Fateless
morphs from a warm color scheme to a cold and barren one, at which point you
literally cannot tell if you’re watching a movie in color or processed,
sepia-tinged black-and-white.

Two competent audio tracks, in 5.1 digital surround and
stereo 2.0, provide ample coverage for the movie’s dialogue and immediate
effects, with the slight nod going to the latter for its edge in robustness
during exterior sequences. That said, the movie’s sound mix generally doesn’t
lockstep match the grim enthrallment of its visuals. Case in point: the arrival
at Auschwitz, in which rain too quietly pours off the
roofs of the barracks that will come to house Gyuri and his fellow prisoners.
English subtitles obviously also grace the movie, which is Hungarian.

Bonus features kick off with the film’s theatrical trailer and a collection of
other arthouse previews. Nobel Prize-winning author Kertész sits for a solid, 28-minute
subtitled interview in which he humbly gives props to Koltai and traces the
film’s production history, including a strained, previous attempt at adaptation
with an unnamed English director. (Koltai is also Hungarian.) Less smoothly involving is a 23-minute making-of
documentary that significantly loses something in translation. While the on-set
footage gives a fascinating glimpse behind the impressive scope of the movie
(including a to-scale replica of Auschwitz’s staging area and barracks), and
chats with young extras (in which one point-blankly reveals his grandfather
followed the same path of his character) lend it a deepening humanity, the
translated subtitles, though, feel off (director Koltai praises his star’s
“punctuate acting”). Young Nagy, though, does reveal how he auditioned for the
movie without being told anything of its content, and he talks candidly about
the most difficult scenes for him to film. B (Movie) B (Disc)