After Fateless was released in 2005, critics praised the film for offering audiences a new look at the Holocaust.  The film indeed offers a different perspective, but its brilliance is short-lived and material too familiar to be a true masterpiece.

Fateless breaks from the usual cinematic Holocaust narrative of Western European Jewry by showing us the world through the eyes of a Jewish Hungarian boy named György (Marcell Nagy), who retains a measure of happiness in spite of all the misery in his life.

Although the protagonist is a bit unusual for a Holocaust film, the imagery of persecution and the camps is quite familiar to people familiar with the Holocaust and/or Holocaust films in general.  To call Fateless resembles a Schindler's List without the intrigue would not be far from the truth.

The film can be praised, however, for the realism in its portrayal of the concentration camp victims.  Unlike the tendency of Spielberg (Schindler's List) and Polanski (The Pianist) to play upon our sentimentality by showing Jews as angelic victims of the Nazi regime, György's fellow prisoners are extremely human in their flaws.  They fight, bicker, and barter in a manner that may prove unsettling to viewers expecting a traditional dichotomy of good and evil in the camps.

Two other things save Fateless from being just another Holocaust film.  The first is György's existential philosophy of happiness, narrated by Nagy and Camus-like in nature, a happiness that comes in the form of rebellion against death and oppression:  we are told that to suffer so much one cannot be hurt anymore brings a kind of happiness.  This is also the philosophy of Camus' Sisyphus, who, like György, is cursed yet still smiling.  Unfortunately, so profound an idea requires a compelling actor to convince us of its truth, and while Nagy physically inhabits his role, his other abilities fall short.

The other aspect of the film that sets it apart -- and is in fact the best part of the film -- is the portrayal of the return of Jews to their homes after the liberation.   Alienated from their humanity by the camps, the victims return to find their homes changed or lost, and people unable to understand their experience.  Consider the scene where a man stops György in the train station and repeatedly asks about the gas chambers.  When György says he didn't see any personally, the man appears strangely satisfied and moves on.  That haunting moment suggests that Holocaust denial may spring from the inability to understand the experience of the Holocaust in addition to old-fashioned anti-Semitism.

In all, these few minutes at the close of the film are emotionally gripping, and I found myself wanting more.  Fateless, alas, was scripted from a novel and the return of the Jews is not the main story we were meant to see.  But it is a story we ought to see.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars