Jan. 6



USA:

MOVIE REVIEW | 'FATELESS'
Finding the Beauty in a Boy's Days of Horror
By A. O. SCOTT


The visual beauty of Lajos Koltai's "Fateless" is unmistakable, and also a
bit disconcerting. This is, after all, a movie about the Holocaust, which
follows a 14-year-old Jewish boy from Budapest to Buchenwald, where it
lingers in mud, misery and death.

For films in this genre - which has grown steadily since Steven
Spielberg's "Schindler's List" was released in 1993 - the test of
verisimilitude is usually the ostentatiously accurate rendering of horror.
There is plenty of that in "Fateless," and yet one finds oneself noticing,
along with the emaciated bodies and ambient cruelty, the delicacy of the
light and the painterly composition of the frames.

There are several explanations for this, the most obvious of which may be
that Mr. Koltai comes to directing (this is his first feature) after a
long and distinguished career as a cinematographer, most notably in
collaboration with Istvan Szabo on films like "Mephisto," "Colonel Redl"
and "Sunshine."

Light is thus Mr. Koltai's natural idiom, as much as prose is for Imre
Kertesz, who based the screenplay for "Fateless" on his autobiographical
novel of the same title. Though I can only judge from the English
translation, it seems that Mr. Kertesz, who won the Nobel Prize in
literature in 2002, is a graceful, lyrical stylist whose writing is
clearly another source of the film's beauty.

But Mr. Kertesz's rendering of his childhood experience, on the page and
now on screen, is by no means an attempt to aestheticize an unredeemable
chapter of history. It represents something stranger and, to those of us
with only a secondhand or thirdhand knowledge of that history, more
disturbing: a survivor's conviction that there were aspects of the
experience itself that can only be described as beautiful.

Now, I should clarify that "Fateless" bears no resemblance to Roberto
Begnigni's "Life Is Beautiful," which turned a death camp into a theater
of sentimental kitsch. It has more in common with "The Pianist," Roman
Polanski's adaptation of Wladyslaw Szpilman's memoir of survival in the
Warsaw Ghetto under Nazi occupation. The two films, indeed, rank among the
best nondocumentary cinematic treatments of the Holocaust yet produced -
dry as well as devastating, and illuminated by surprising flashes of
absurdist humor that carry the authority of lived experience.

A mordant sense of the ridiculous pierces the gloom of "Fateless," a form
of wit that seems to combine Jewish comic traditions with the wry fatalism
common in small nations perpetually batted around by their larger imperial
neighbors.

The hero, Gyorgy Koves (Marcell Nagy), nicknamed Gyuri, thinks of himself
as both Jewish and Hungarian, and mocks a friend's attempt to determine an
independent essence of Jewishness. Gyuri's father is a factory owner who,
as the film begins, is about to be sent away to perform manual labor.

The full force of the German campaign against Jews arrived in Hungary
later than in other countries, and Gyuri's neighbors and relatives seem
bewildered and unprepared, fussing over irrelevancies and dispensing false
reassurance. When Gyuri and some other boys are ordered off a city bus on
the way to their work assignments, they take it as both an example of
bureaucratic incompetence and something of a lark. The adults who join
them are annoyed and indignant; nobody, at first, thinks to be scared.

Of course, the audience knows better, but Mr. Koltai, telling his story in
short scenes punctuated by slow blackouts and linked by Ennio Morricone's
occasionally bombastic score, tries to narrow the gap between Gyuri's
perspective and ours. Although some of the incidents seem almost like set
pieces of Holocaust literature (inevitably so, since part of Hitler's
program was the standardization of destruction), "Fateless" has an uncanny
freshness.

We may be familiar with this kind of story from books and other films, but
for Gyuri everything is happening uniquely and for the first time. This
makes it, crazily but also logically, an adventure as well as an ordeal.
As he shrinks down to skin and bones, Gyuri's eyes seem to grow wider in
his head, and they seem to register both terror and wonder.

In the camp, he finds kindness, in particular from a fellow Hungarian
(Aron Dimeny). He also discovers that the ordinary course of life yields
moments of pleasure. In his voice-over, he speaks of loving the hour of
idleness between work and the nighttime roll call. He and the other
inmates eat their vile rations not only with desperation, but with relish
as well, when they discover a scrap of meat or a potato. The ability to
wring such satisfactions from nearly absolute deprivation is one of the
ways the prisoners hold on to their humanity.

And Gyuri, whose previous experience of the world is narrower than that of
his older comrades, experiences "fatelessness" - the likelihood that his
life will end at any moment - as a perverse form of freedom.

When fate returns him to Budapest, where more Jews survived than in most
other European capitals, he finds that the incomprehension of the people
who had stayed behind, and the persistence of normal life during his
incarceration, make him nostalgic for Buchenwald.

It is on that almost incomprehensibly bittersweet note that "Fateless"
ends, and the film's achievement is to make Gyuri's response to his
experience not only credible, but also necessary.

To the modern viewer, watching movies about the Holocaust carries an
inevitable element of solipsism: what would I have done? How would I have
behaved? This is a way of normalizing and domesticating something that
surpasses comprehension. The achievement of "Fateless" is to work in
reverse, to show us what it might have been like to endure atrocity as a
form of ordinary reality, which is exactly what is hardest to imagine.

Fateless

Opens today in Manhattan.

Directed by Lajos Koltai; written (in Hungarian and German, with English
subtitles) by Imre Kertesz, based on his novel "Sorstalansag"; director of
photography, Gyula Pados; edited by Hajnal Sello; music by Ennio
Morricone; production designer, Tibor Lazar; produced by Andras Hamori;
released by ThinkFilm. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of
Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 140 minutes. This
film is not rated.

WITH: Marcell Nagy (Gyuri Koves), Aron Dimeny (Bandi Citrom), Andras M.
Kecskes (Finn), Jozsef Gyabronka (Unlucky Man), Endre Harkanyi (Old
Kollmann) and Daniel Craig (United States Army Sergeant).

(source: New York Times)








POLAND:

Jewish leader offended by Auschwitz ad

A Krakow bus company has angered Polish Jews and relatives of Auschwitz
survivors and victims with ads for tours that feature a picture of barbed
wire.

Piotr Kadlcik, chairman of Poland's Union of Religious Jewish Communities,
told the Jerusalem Post the PKS Malopolska bus company's posters are
"outrageous and beyond tasteless." He said he thought the bus company was
being "stupid," not deliberately offensive.

The poster has a soft-focus photograph of a camp building with barbed wire
in sharp focus. The text offers $24 tours to Auschwitz with the words
"Auschwitz? With a return ticket? From the city center? Yes it's
possible."

The bus company's president, Tomasz Stanek, said he had no intention of
offending anyone. He said his company is the only one in Krakow that
provides tours featuring the pre-war Jewish community of Oswiecim or
Auschwitz.


****************************************************

Oskar Schindler museum to open in Poland


The Polish factory used to save more than 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust
and featured in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" is being turned
into a museum.

The building owned by Oskar Schindler in a suburb of Krakow was crumbling
and overrun by rats, The Telegraph reported Monday. Pressure from
international groups and the local Jewish community spurred city officials
to raise funds to restore the enamel and tinware factory.

The museum dedicated to Schindler is expected to open officially in
December.

In addition to rooms and props featured in Spielberg's movie, the museum
will have files on all the workers Schindler saved.

"This is one of the few places connected to the Holocaust which is not
entirely negative and associated with dead bodies," project manager
Aleksander Janicki told the newspaper.

A plaque outside the museum quotes a Jewish saying: "Whoever saves one
life, saves the world entire."

Schindler died in poverty in 1974 and is buried in Israel.

(source for both: United Press International)





THE NETHERLANDS:

Dutch railway apologizes for WWII deeds

In Amsterdam, the Dutch rail company NS publicly apologized for the first
time Thursday for its part in transporting Jews to Nazi death camps in
World War II.

Speaking at Muiderpoort station in the east of Amsterdam on the 62nd
anniversary of the transportation of 11,000 Jews from the station, Aad
Veenman, head of NS, launched an anti-racism campaign, Expatica said.

Veenman offered an apology "from the bottom of my heart and in all
deference" to the Jewish community and all other minority groups rounded
up by the Germans and put on trains supplied by the NS. Most of the
victims were sent to the death camps at Auschwitz and Sobibor.

Over 100,000 Jews were taken from the Netherlands and sent to
concentration camps. The last big deportation of Jews took place at the
end of September 1943.

(source: United Press International)