Telluride 2005 #4
This weekend isn't really all that free, but it's probably not going to get much freer later and, well, I do have enough time to finish reviewing the movies I saw at this year's Telluride.
The fourth feature this year was the Hungarian movie Sorstalnaság (English title: Fateless). Regular readers of this rarely-posted-to blog (if any exist!) may remember that my favourite movie from last year's Telluride was a Hungarian movie: Kontroll. Apart from their common language, the two movies are utterly different. Kontroll had "indie" written all over it; Sorstalnaság is a big budget production enthusiastically funded by the Hungarian government, with Nobel laureate Imre Kertész handling screenplay and distinguished Italian composer Ennio Morricone handling the score (director Lajos Koltai is no unknown figure either, having impressed as a cinematographer before this). Kontroll was edgy, kinetic and unpredictable; Sorstalnaság is muted, deliberately paced and tells an all-too-familar story.
That familiar story that supplies most of the action in Sorstalnaság is that of concentration camp life during the Holocaust. However, do not try to fit this movie into a narrow category of "Holocaust movies", for this movie is really about the story of one teenaged Budapest boy, Gyuri, and his experience of the camps as a detached, introverted teenager. When the movie begins, towards the end of WW2, we see that Gyuri is a quiet kid, wiser than his age would indicate, whom adolescence has made not rebellious but cynical. A seemingly inconsequential decision to take the bus rather than the train, coupled with some very unlucky timing, puts Gyuri on an inexorable path leading to capture, detention, deportation, Auschwitz, Buchenwald and other concentration camps. What we, the viewers, see as a grotesque distortion of normality is, for teenaged Gyuri, simply continuing education about life. He simply takes it as his new reality and carries on, never once screaming or crying through the entire length of the movie. Yet, by the time the movie enters its extended coda where Gyuri returns from the ordeal, we realize that he has become a man we will never understand because there is absolutely nothing comparable in our life experience to help us understand him.
With a body count of zero, this is about the least explicitly violent movie ever to tackle any aspect of the Holocaust. Yet, there are two scenes so deeply disturbing that they haunted me for days afterwards. I won't reveal what they are; watch the movie and decide for yourself. Score: 8/10
The fourth feature this year was the Hungarian movie Sorstalnaság (English title: Fateless). Regular readers of this rarely-posted-to blog (if any exist!) may remember that my favourite movie from last year's Telluride was a Hungarian movie: Kontroll. Apart from their common language, the two movies are utterly different. Kontroll had "indie" written all over it; Sorstalnaság is a big budget production enthusiastically funded by the Hungarian government, with Nobel laureate Imre Kertész handling screenplay and distinguished Italian composer Ennio Morricone handling the score (director Lajos Koltai is no unknown figure either, having impressed as a cinematographer before this). Kontroll was edgy, kinetic and unpredictable; Sorstalnaság is muted, deliberately paced and tells an all-too-familar story.
That familiar story that supplies most of the action in Sorstalnaság is that of concentration camp life during the Holocaust. However, do not try to fit this movie into a narrow category of "Holocaust movies", for this movie is really about the story of one teenaged Budapest boy, Gyuri, and his experience of the camps as a detached, introverted teenager. When the movie begins, towards the end of WW2, we see that Gyuri is a quiet kid, wiser than his age would indicate, whom adolescence has made not rebellious but cynical. A seemingly inconsequential decision to take the bus rather than the train, coupled with some very unlucky timing, puts Gyuri on an inexorable path leading to capture, detention, deportation, Auschwitz, Buchenwald and other concentration camps. What we, the viewers, see as a grotesque distortion of normality is, for teenaged Gyuri, simply continuing education about life. He simply takes it as his new reality and carries on, never once screaming or crying through the entire length of the movie. Yet, by the time the movie enters its extended coda where Gyuri returns from the ordeal, we realize that he has become a man we will never understand because there is absolutely nothing comparable in our life experience to help us understand him.
With a body count of zero, this is about the least explicitly violent movie ever to tackle any aspect of the Holocaust. Yet, there are two scenes so deeply disturbing that they haunted me for days afterwards. I won't reveal what they are; watch the movie and decide for yourself. Score: 8/10
posted by AC at 5:19 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home