Hungarian director Lajos Koltai's film version of Imre Kertesz's 'Fateless' does not shy away from depicting the beauty that existed in life in Auschwitz
Should it come as a surprise that what some critics are calling the finest Holocaust film ever made was the work of a non-Jew? In the case of Hungarian cinematographer Lajos Koltai, who found himself given the assignment by Hungarian-Jewish Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz of directing "Fateless," the screen adaptation of his 1975 novel of the same name, the question may well be worth asking. Especially as Koltai feels no compunction about informing The Jerusalem Report that in filming the quasi-biographical details of Kertesz's wartime experiences, he looked for inspiration to Jesus' ascent to Calvary. Not as a metaphor for his own ordeal in bringing off the most expensive Hungarian film spectacle ever attempted, mind you, but for that of Kertesz's fictional depiction of his own youthful self, arrested and sent to Auschwitz at the height of the Holocaust in Hungary.
"Oh, come on," Koltai snapped, when I expressed surprise at his choice of Jesus as a governing metaphor for the story of the author who was long denigrated in his native Hungary for making his fiction too Jewish. "You know Jesus was a Jew, and that everybody is carrying the heavy cross on his shoulder. It's made from wood, or maybe it is your faith. But everyone has one."
Whatever works, I found myself thinking. Especially when one recalls that Steven Spielberg decided to fashion his own definitive statement on the Holocaust around the experiences of a flamboyant Polish anti-Semite. Still, it's probably a good thing for Hungary that "Fateless" didn't get chosen to be one of the final five nominees for Best Foreign Film Oscar this year.
The Hungarians had a hard enough time in 2002 coming to grips with the fact that the book from which it was adapted (published as "Fatelessness" in the U.S. in 2004, by Random House) almost single-handedly ended four decades of Hungarian literary obscurity when Kertesz, then 72 and the author of eight novels total, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (see "My Lunch with Imre," a profile of Kertesz, February 21, 2005).
According to Holocaust scholar Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Kertesz's work has garnered mixed reviews from Hungarians, many of whom doubt that "a Jew who writes so frequently and passionately about Auschwitz can be a genuine 'Hungarian.'"
As a result, "Fatelessness," which took 10 years to find a publisher, was initially ignored by the critics, little read by other Hungarians, and went out of print with unusual dispatch. Reduced to writing librettos for musical comedies and translating German classics into Hungarian, Kertesz did not publish another novel until 1988. His books began to acquire literary currency in translation during the early 1990s, particularly in Germany, France and Sweden. But in Hungary, they languished until 2002, when by virtue of their recognition in Stockholm they could no longer be ignored.
Saddled with "an (imposed) marginality (that) has shadowed the author for years," wrote Rosenfeld in 2004 in the New Leader magazine, Kertesz nevertheless stuck it out in his native Hungary, where "the feelings of rejection, solitariness, pain, and vulnerability" remained "indelible aspects of his personal biography as well as recurring themes in his work."
According to French-Hungarian historian Francois Fejto, Kertesz's Nobel was intended partly as a reproach to Hungary for its refusal to come to terms with its complicity in the deportation of 600,000 Jews, most of whom perished in the camps.
Hungary, Kertesz himself complained after receiving the prize, still has "no awareness of the Holocaust." The Communists, he said, had tried "to smother (its memory), then to degrade it to some petty 'Jewish affair.'" For one to be a "'good Jew'" in Hungary, he said, "meant rejecting Jewish particularity." Despite the success of "Fateless" last year at the Hungarian box office, critics of the country believe it will yet take time before that attitude falls by the wayside.
"Fateless" is the story of 14-year-old Gyuri Koves (Marcell Nagy), a young Hungarian who, in June 1944, is removed by a somewhat befuddled Hungarian gendarme from a Budapest bus and herded onto a train, first for transport to Auschwitz, and then, after he has reported his age as 16 and is thus deemed fit for labor, to Buchenwald.
Taken under the wing of an older Jewish inmate, Koves quickly adapts to the rigors of camp life, learning where to stand in the food queue for the best scraps, how to pace himself at work, how to overcome vermin and disease, and, most important, how to focus on making it through the day, and, day by day, through his year-long ordeal.
Toward the end of his captivity, Koves is starving, his body mottled with sores and chancres, his knee near gangrenous, his quiet reserves of pluck all but depleted. But for the efforts of a few non-Jewish political prisoners, who spirit him into a camp hospital that actually treats its patients, Koves would have ended the war in a grave, or at least in a terminally detached state of shattered body and spirit.
In another of Kertesz's Holocaust-related novels, "Liquidation" (2003), a philosopher declares that "Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate." In the case of Koves, he survives to be freed by the Americans, one of whom, a Jewish officer, urges him to emigrate to the U.S. Koves demurs - how could going back to the ruins of Budapest be worse than anything he endured in Poland or Germany? When he returns, however, he learns that his father had died in the camps and that his stepmother has remarried (he has no connection with his mother). His fellow Hungarians, moreover, take a dim view of the reappearance in their midst of virtual ghosts, some of whom even have the audacity to inquire into the fate of their confiscated homes and property.
The film ends with Koves, now 16 but with the sunken eyes of a 50-year-old, pining for the simple yet intense pleasures of internment: the camaraderie, the inexplicable acts of mutual kindness, the restful hour each day between the end of work and the doling out of the evening's bread ration, and yes, spectacular sunsets not even the barbed wire could obscure.
The movie's refusal to focus exclusively on the grim exigencies of camp life, and Koltai's uncanny ability to depict and even celebrate those occasional instances of sublimity discernible amid the horror and squalor, led Variety to credit "Fateless" with creating "a genuinely new way of looking at the Holocaust that is markedly different in tone from other such stories, including 'Schindler's List' and 'The Pianist.'"
It is a way of looking at the Holocaust, moreover, that, according to the New York Times's A.O. Scott, in no way recalls Roberto Benigni's intolerably kitschy "Life Is Beautiful." "It represents," observed Scott, "something stranger and, to those of us with only a secondhand or third-hand 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."
One scene in the movie, for instance, presents an aesthetically satisfying overhead shot of a detachment of Jewish laborers required to stand in formation outside their barracks through the night after an inmate's escape. Those who fall out are beaten, or worse. The camera zooms in to focus on one man, his body swaying back and forth, his arms outstretched and palms upraised. He could easily be praying, lost, perhaps, in a blissful state of ecstatic transport. He may well indeed be praying. But he is also caught in the throes of a terrible effort merely to keep from collapsing.
Speaking to The Report by telephone, Koltai insisted that, "beauty and horror live together. Sunshine is not intrinsically different simply because it is seen from behind barbed wire. The people who take home pictures and moments from this film, who find a poetry and humor in it, do not do so at the expense of the horror of the experience. The presence of beauty and horror offers the most complete picture of what happened."
One might be tempted to attribute this emphasis on the hitherto unspeakable to the fact that Koltai is a world-class cinematographer whose technical manipulations of light and darkness would seem to lend themselves to a subject concerned with the more hidden shadings of human morality. Yet the film reflects the concerns of its author in all its aspects, including its emphasis on his character's nostalgic yearnings.
"Auschwitz," Kertesz said in his Nobel speech in Stockholm, in words that largely paraphrased the closing lines of "Fateless," "is my greatest treasure. The closeness to death is unforgettable. Life was never so beautiful as in this long moment… even back there, in the shadow of the chimneys, in the breaks between pain, there was something resembling happiness. Yes, that's what I'll tell them the next time they ask me: about the happiness in those camps."
Koltai first encountered the book in Morocco in 2000 while he was shooting director Giuseppe Tornatore's film "Mal?na," a project that would earn him an Oscar nomination for cinematography in 2000. A longtime collaborator of Hungarian filmmaker Istzvan Szabo, with whom he worked on "Mephisto," "Colonel Redl" and "Sunshine," Koltai seemed a logical, if inspired, choice, even though this was to be his first outing as director.
At a meeting brokered with the author, Koltai was asked if he would look at the first draft of a script penned not by Kertesz but by another Hungarian writer. Koltai returned a week later saying that more important than conveying the reality of the Holocaust, any film adaptation of "Fateless" would, in his estimation, have to get into the head of a 14-year-old and be able to convey his experiences from an adolescent's perspective.
The screenplay, he suggested, should unfold in a linear fashion, moving from moment to moment, episode to episode, with the measured regularity of night and day, moon and sun. The story, he said, should proceed in a fashion that is quiet, poetic and visual. There should be no big emotional scene, certainly no undue sentiment. We've all seen the archival footage of the camps, Koltai recalls saying to Kertesz. What no one has seen was the experience as told through the eyes of a young boy.
Kertesz, much heartened by the latter's take on the story, agreed to revise the screenplay himself, and asked Koltai, who turns 60 this April, to come aboard as director. Koltai set to work casting and commissioning the design of more than 10 elaborate sets. The production went into suspension for four months halfway through production, however, when its original financing fell through. Andras Hamori, a Hungarian-born Jew now based in Toronto, who has produced films by Atom Egoyan ("The Sweet Hereafter"), David Cronenberg ("eXistenZ"), as well as Szabo's "Sunshine," soon took over as producer, and moved the film back on schedule.
"Imre did not think this film could have been made by a Jewish director," Koltai told The Report. "I think he believed you needed to come at the story from a dispassionate place where there is no room for sentiment. I suggested that everyone shares the same images of the Germans and the dogs, etc., from the archives. I said I'd be happy if you wanted to make a silent film, to go inside people and look through the small keyhole he provides us."