Elysium

Elysium is one of the most stunning and distressing films I've ever seen. Set during WW2, the story introduces us to a 9 year old Jewish boy (Guyri) in German controlled Hungary who leaves home with a basket to collect some produce from a neighbour. On his way to the neighbour Guyri is rounded up, with others, by the Hungarian Police acting under Nazi orders and taken away. Despite being well off and well connected his parents struggle with the limited means available to Jews during the war to get Guyri back. The character of Guyri, the young boy, is played with devastating innocence by Zoltan Nagy. For a film about Nazis, Jews and a concentration camp Elysium has an odd lack of overt racism or violence. There is little shouting and no obvious cruelty. The acute awareness and savage detail of the racism, violence and cruelty implicit in the film is already held in our minds with the knowledge of hindsight. What there is plenty of is laziness in officialdom, a jobsworth mentality, the avoidance of responsibility and a lack of interest that emphasises the old saying about what happens when good people stand by and do nothing. The only Nazi ideology expressed in the whole movie is declaimed by the concentration camp doctor in a Christmas speech to children who have been segregated for 'experimental' medical treatment. The films subtlety is all the more emotionally painful for its reserve. This is not an action movie. This is a film that places you, piece by excruciating piece in the shoes of the parents whose small child has been stolen by the Nazis and what that child feels with his life in the hands of adults whose behaviour is beyond his understanding, but not ours. We, the interlopers, the voyeurs of the unfolding tragedy, understand everything and can only look on helpless and unable to assist either the parents or the boy. Made when Hungary was a satellite country of the USSR, this (almost) lost masterpiece needs to be re-scanned in 4k and given a worldwide release for its awful greatness and powerful impact to be fully realised.

This film is easily on the same level as The Pianist, but a lot more subtle and poetical, made 15 years earlier than Polanski's film - and also on a much more modest budget. It's not 'just' about a child's journey through the Shoa; it's also about much greater issues, such as the uncomfortable realization that being 'good' (as in behaving properly and humbly, forcing ourselves to follow 'respectable people' and their norms and beliefs) is exploited by evil to destroy good itself. It's about a journey most of us are forced to make in our lives at one point or another, and compels the viewer to face up to the starkest conclusions. Made just a few years before the fall of the Communist regime in Hungary, it was also fairly courageous in its choice of subject matter, ethical stance, and focus. It has its flaws (most of them due to its budgetary constraints and subsequent technological limits) yet it remains one of my most memorable movie experiences. The ending seared itself into my mind for the last 34 years.