Fateless While Disturbing Features Excellent Cinematography

Fateless is a very disturbing film. It's about a Hungarian boy serving time for war labor in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. The cinematography is excellent.

Gyuri is the boy. Played handsomely by Marcell Nagy, Gyuri is sent away. Why? Why did his family urge him to go? He must have been a threat, a serious threat.

He almost dies. That's the plot. That's it. He doesn't understand what he is doing there. He was told that he would be participating in war labor activities. It almost killed him, but he never saw any combat. He was just worked and nearly starved to death.

Fate of course is the cosmic code, and fateless would imply a lack there of. Great title. There is no code in war. It's brutality. It's chaos. It's mayhem, and it is hell. To Gyuri there was no hell. There was just the camp.

Technically, the editing and the cinematography gave this film some range that really made it more disturbing than it ought to be I thought. The images were crisp and clear, cold, hard, desolate. Of the finest quality cinematographer Gyula Pados shot the near death experiences of young Gyuri.

Many directors and editors choose to illustrate suffering by disorienting the viewer. The scene is cut up into pieces, and unusual angles are depicted. Sometimes they toy with the sound.

Lajos Koltai, the director, chose to do none of these things for the most part. Moments of emptyness and bewilderment were made whole. They were not cut into pieces, and there was very little disorientation visually. It's disturbing because there was so much attention payed to the production; costumes, set, imagery, yet the director chose to keep these moments of freight, these moments of terror, these moments of insecurity whole texturally as if there is a soul behind it that travels relatively unscathed. 

This is a lot of credit Koltai gives to his protagonist, the boy war laborer. He says that no matter how much pain and no matter how much suffering did occur this boy, that he was still bounded to the will of God, the will of unity, the will of peace and tranquility.. This, this bond is how he perservered. It is articulated through the editing and direction.