Fateless

Imre Kertesz, who owns a Nobel Prize for literature, was a young teenager when the Nazis swept through Budapest in 1944, ahead of the advancing Soviets. Until then, Hungary was one of the few Axis nations that had not marked Jews for extermination.

The arrival of the Germans changed that, and Kertesz barely survived a yearlong odyssey through Auschwitz, Buchenwald and other concentration camps.

The same thing happens to the similarly aged Gyuri Koves in Kertesz's novel "Fateless." The author's insistence that the book is not autobiographical is, to say the least, suspect. Whatever is true or is fiction, the novel persuasively evokes a naive boy's view of the death-camp experience, something he can't help but look at with an unworldly blend of incomprehension, desperation, detachment and — most odd but understandable — as just the way things go.

This filmed version of "Fateless," scripted by Kertesz and directed by a fellow Hungarian, the cinematographer Lajos Koltai, is equally effective at putting us in the mind of a pretty average 15-year-old confronted with unimaginable horror and cruelty.

The film has an almost nonjudgmental, experiential quality that, while it certainly doesn't downplay the evil of the Holocaust, refuses to cheapen it with melodrama or "Life Is Beautiful"-style whimsy. Some absurdity occurs in "Fateless," and a lot of it unfolds like an awful dream. Yet it all has the ring of objective reporting, albeit by a disoriented, starving and sometimes delirious observer.

Marcell Nagy plays Gyuri, and the kid is a marvel. He lost a dangerous amount of weight for the role, but even more disturbing is the shell-shocked resignation that masks his face for so much of the movie. Nagy becomes a ghost, essentially if not literally, at some point in the second act, and even after his character is liberated, the actor does not let him return entirely to the land of the living. It's an astonishingly controlled performance by one so young, and Nagy's wraithlike but dogged appearance will be difficult to shake from any viewer's memory.

Koltai, who has shot most of Istvan Szabo's films ("Mephisto," "Sunshine," "Being Julia") chose an eternally overcast, color-drained palette for the film, and a real photographer's eye is evident in many an exquisitely composed frame. Some have complained that he over-aestheticizes the Holocaust, but I didn't find the movie's formal rigor at all distracting. In fact, its look enhances the piece's sense of physical and psychological oppression, as well as the feelings of isolation and disembodiment that Gyuri goes through. Plus, it pulls off the tough trick of somehow looking naturalistic and surreal at the same time.

If the movie has a major weakness, it's what seems like a rushed ending. Gyuri comes to some profound and controversial realizations that aren't as fully dramatized as they deserve to be, but are instead recited to us in a long voiceover narration. As great a novelist as he may be, Kertesz evidently isn't aware of the most basic screenwriting taboos.

Which is not a big deal, considering all that the author has been through and accomplished. And if he doesn't want to claim "Fateless" as his own story, that's his privilege, too. It's a great tale of a ghastly but, in Kertesz's telling, compellingly accessible fate. And that's what really matters in the end.

"Fateless" is rated R for violence, racism, language, nudity, children in jeopardy. Running time: 140 minutes.