Fateless

In this desolate Hungarian film, viewers once again are presented with the grim iconography of the Holocaust: the cattle cars, dead-eyed people, piles of abandoned luggage, and ever-present monochromatic gray, albeit beautifully filmed. But just when you're starting to feel your heart harden out of simple self-preservation, Fateless—which is based on the novel Fatelessness by Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertész—looks anew at these familiar horrors through the adolescent eyes of 14-year-old Gyuri Köves (the remarkable Marcell Nagy), who seems, even before he's deported to a concentration camp, to be the only one who notices how willingly his elders acquiesce to illicit German authority, making it easy for the Nazi invaders to round them up. And the title, which seems to suggest hopelessness and despair at first, is in fact Gyuri's personal battle cry: his parents and grandparents and friends may go willingly to the fate God has decreed for them, but he won't. If 6,000,000 million deaths have, alas, become both a numbing statistic and a cinematic cliché, filmmaker Lajos Koltai's Fateless, with its searing focus on one vibrant life, effectively personalizes--once again--one of history's greatest tragedies. Recommended. [Note: DVD extras include a 28-minute interview with Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertész, a 24-minute “making-of” featurette, and trailers. Bottom line: a solid extras package for a powerful foreign film.] (M. Johanson)