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Fateless is a surreal, low-key tale of a boy's journey to hell & back

Fateless is a surreal, low-key tale of a boy's journey to hell & back
by Derich Mantonela - SGN A&E Writer Fateless Opens Friday at the Metro I systematically avoid Holocaust movies. They are just too painful for me to watch. An exception was "The Pianist," which I more or less forced myself to see, and ended up appreciating and admiring. Another is first-time Hungarian director Lajos Koltai's "Fateless," for which Nobel Prize-winning writer Imre Kertesz adapted the screenplay, based on his semi-autobiographical book. One reason I chose to screen "Fateless" is that Koltai was the cinematographer for one of my favorite films of recent years, "Being Julia." "Fateless" shares with "The Pianist" a modulated, low-key (though certainly not head-in-the-sand) view of Holocaust horrors, told from the intimate viewpoint of one of its victims; a sensitive, introspective soul who manages to somewhat detach himself from the evils happening all around him and to him. Each film exudes a subtle, surreal aura, and is - in the end - a tale of survival and of a re-shaping of reality. Marcell Nagy plays a fourteen year old Budapest Jewish boy whose well-to-do, intellectual, old world family of respected professionals is gradually sucked into the Holocaust rather late, in 1944. Quirks of fate send members of his family, then himself, off to various Nazi concentration camps. Alone, he endures an odyssey which would destroy most of us and yet enriches him in curious, unexpected, intimately human ways. His experiences, filtered as they are through his young poet's soul, are comprised of moods and incidents which are luminous and uplifting in the face of evil and doom, highlighted by simple acts of decency and bravery and of a kind of personal aestheticism. "Fateless" is all the more powerful and profound for its subtlety, its attention to everyday detail, its honesty and its avoidance of preachy moralizing or corny "epiphanies." All the characters are perfectly drawn - yes, we feel that this is the way these people were, this is how they lived and spoke, this is their realm. It isn't until the boy emerges at the end of his ordeal as a young (and now infinitely old) man sent back to his former home that "Fateless" becomes truly shocking - revealing a world which goes indifferently on, refusing to learn from the recent past and entirely caught up in its humdrum, soulless self.