dvd

I've no patience for the Holocaust docudrama; didn't even see Schindler's List till years after its 1993 release, resulting in my parents' everlasting shame. And so it was I avoided Lajos Koltai's acclaimed adaptation of Imre Kertész Nobel Prize-winning autobiographic novel; are we not already gorged on the grim concentration-camp movies that fall off the assembly line with alarming regularity? Yet Fateless is too quietly powerful and strangely beautiful to be dismissed as one more we-must-never-forget mourner's kaddish. It's the nightmare (that of a 14-year-old Jewish boy, played by the always-withering Marcell Nagy) that's shot and recounted like a dream; it sings, much like the writer himself in the making-of doc included here. And it could even be mistaken for an adventure yarn—an old man telling a child's tale of survival without a teardrop of sentimentality, lest he make himself a victim all these years later.