Fourteen-year-old György Köves (Marcell Nagy) feels strangely distant from life under the Nazis in World War II-era Budapest, and when his father gets the order to be taken off to a labour camp, he is happy to leave school, not really taking in what is happening. His father and his stepmother make the arrangements to take care of their business and György bids farewell to his father that night, after having it explained to him that he didn't wish to wake his son when he is transported early in the morning. György manages a few tears, but mainly because he thinks it's expected of him and will make his father feel better. What particularly concerns him the following day is the girl who lives in the apartment next door, but she is upset that she does not understand why the Jews like her family and György's are being persecuted. György doesn't realise how bad things are going to get for him...
I suppose Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List is seen by many audiences as the last word on the Holocaust in film, but director Lajos Koltai's Fateless, or Sorstalanság to give it the Hungarian title, is easily as good without the more unnecessary and manipulative excesses of the Hollywood version. It was based on the novel by Imre Kertész who invested his own experiences in the Nazi concentration camps into both the book and his script for this film, and at first stresses the feeling of its main character that the fate of being sent to such places verged on the arbitrary. Koltai shoots in almost monochrome, underlining the look of newsreel footage that we see of the War, starting with a bright yellow and, as the situation grows worse, gradually sapping the colour from the frame until it is almost all hues of grey.
The story has a horrible simplicity to it, and Nagy is more than up to the task of taking us on the path to György's transformation from naive teenager to haunted victim. György is on the bus to his work and the bus is stopped; then a policeman gets on and instructs everyone wearing a yellow star to follow him. On leaving, György finds the policeman has been ordered to stop every bus that passes and remove the Jews from them. He doesn't know what exactly to do with them, so they hang around in a nearby building until further instructions from the powers that be, and the group he has collected become steadily more nervous. Then, with the inevitability of a nightmare, they are sent on their journey to the concentration camps, and György only manages to avoid being executed immediately by pretending to be aged sixteen.
But where has he ended up? After stops at Auschwitz and Buchenwald he finally is incarcerated at the smaller camp of Zeitz, which is not one which executes its captives. György must take all the comfort he can from that, because the conditions there are desperate, to say the least, but there is something that emerges: the camaraderie between the inmates. Presumably Kertész wanted to emphasise the indomitable humanity of the Jews in the face of the aggressively ignorant Nazis, and the characters are able to find lighter moments amongst the ordeal, but mainly Fateless comes across as a catalogue of misery. The familiarity of this from books, documentaries and drama does little to play down the hell onscreen, from the frustrating pettiness of the reasons for sending the characters there to a more righteous outrage at the bigger picture, and even though György, in voiceover at the end, says he wishes to tell of the happiness he found there as well as the despair, there's precious little to be cheerful about here other than some being able to survive. How they were ever able to be happy again is not explained. Music by Ennio Morricone.
