TERRIBLE BEAUTY

REVIEWED - FATELESS/SORSTALANSÁG: Shamefully ignored at this year's Oscars, Fateless is a collaboration of several remarkable Hungarian creative talents making auspicious debuts in different roles. It is the first film written by Imre Kertész, who received the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature, and is based on his autobiographical first novel, published in 1975.

The film marks the directing debut, at the age of 59, of Lajos Koltai, the distinguished cinematographer whose credits include many films directed by István Szabó. And it features a wonderfully expressive young newcomer in Marcell Nagy, who is hypnotic as Györgi, the pivotal character based on Kertész, who was in his early teens when he survived the Nazi concentration camps.

As the film begins, it is the spring of 1944 and the German occupation of Budapest is underway. Györgi is a 14-year-old schoolboy from a middle-class family, and there is a low-key but deeply affecting early scene when his father, a factory owner, says goodbye to his family before being taken away to a labour camp.

Taken out of school and going to work, Györgi himself is one of many men and boys rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. He is too young and immature to comprehend what is happening, but then, as we are immersed in the film's searing, realistic recreation of life and death in the concentration camps, it is still difficult for the viewer, even from a distance of 60 years away, to comprehend fully the sheer calculation and inhumanity of this horrific scheme.

Györgi is clever enough to pretend to be 16, marking him out as a workhorse worth keeping alive for a while, and he taps into an unerring instinct for survival, avidly eating any scraps that become available while adhering to the rules and not drawing attention to himself.

Daily life in the camps, with its grinding routine of hard labour and aching hunger, begins to feel strangely mundane to Györgi, and the film takes on a dreamlike quality that could turn nightmarish at any time. Colour is drained away as this eerie landscape of rain and mud is dominated by tones of black and grey.

This quietly powerful and entirely unsentimental drama is distinctively framed in haunting widescreen compositions by Gyula Pados, the Hungarian cinematographer whose credits include Kontroll and Thaddeus O'Sullivan's The Heart of Me. These inedible images are accompanied on the soundtrack by a melancholy Ennio Morricone score.

It is ironic, perhaps, but clearly deliberate that a film on such a wrenching theme should be so beautiful, even though it is a terrible beauty. It is appropriate, too, and in keeping with Kertész's philosophical reflections on his tough coming of age. "Hell doesn't exist, but the camps do," Györgi concludes.

The film's resolution, if such it can be described, is fundamentally bittersweet, and shaded by our knowledge of life in Hungary under Communism in the decades after the war.