05-11-06,9:00am

Directed by Lajos Koltai

Adapted from Imre Kertesz's Nobel Prize-winning semi-autobiographical novel, Lajos Koltai's powerful film follows the fortunes of a 14-year-old as he experiences the horrors of three World War II concentration camps.

As such, it could be considered another film from the 'Holocaust industry,' despite the fact that the camps were used to exterminate millions of Poles, Slavs, Russians and others that the nazis deemed non-Aryan.

Kertesz clearly wants us to see his 'people' as like people everywhere, full of contradictions, with heroes and villains, but mostly people who tried to survive, no matter the cost.

Jews collaborating in their own extermination? Of course, just as the rest of occupied Europe had its traitors. It's a factor that many people like to forget when they extol the virtues of their glorious resistance.

Thus, his central character Gyuri Koves (Marcell Nagy), a product of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother, often seems strangely ambivalent, even serenely indifferent, almost a classical stoic.

In short, it is neither another Schindler's List nor The Pianist. The narrative is composed of short vignettes that are aimed to illustrate that this is one man's view of an ongoing inhumanity.

Opening in Budapest in 1944, the Jewish community is still largely intact and, despite the fact that they are identified by wearing a yellow star, many are docile and have delusions about the nazis' real intent.

First seen with his father (Janos Ban), Gyuri appears to have a life that many working people in Britain at the time could only dream about - and this despite having his business confiscated.

The extended family includes those who think that the sufferings of the Jews is fated, an infliction from God because of sins past, still living in the shadow of the destruction of Jerusalem and being scattered.

Others simply think that they are going to be packed off to foreign parts as forced labour, as his father is, but not before committing his son not to return to his birth mother, so ensuring that he continues the faith.

Thus the reasons for his initial ambivalence. Only after he's picked off a bus by a policeman and then dispatched by train to Auschwitz does he realise that he might not be there if he hadn't been wearing his yellow star.

Herein, due to the serial nature of the narrative, Gyuri is slowly transformed through starvation and ill treatment, learning that many of his own are only too willing to exploit his innocence, never mind destroy his body.

Lajos Koltai, who was Istvan Szabo's chief cinematographer on films such as Mephisto, illustrates the deterioration as the colour palette runs from muted earth colours to almost monochrome.

As visually stunning as previous work, it also adds to the sense of serenity, the patterns of the prisoners forced to work out in the rain, their familiar striped uniforms rippling across the screen like a moire effect.

Throughout his early shock, there's only one fellow prisoner seemingly prepared to help him - Bandi Citron (Aron Dimeny), a working-class Jew from Budapest with obvious left-wing sympathies.

He simply explains that 'self-esteem is more important than bread and soup,' that he should have 'a goal,' because having a will to live is an obvious advantage over those who have surrendered to their fate.

Later, at death's door, he is prepared to pretend that a fellow prisoner lying alongside him is still alive so that he can get his ration. Suddenly, he sees that there are many different ways to survive.

Although it's increasingly horrific, the film could have gone further, since the level of collaboration was severe, as illustrated by the discovery that one of their number was working for the Gestapo.

Ending up in Buchenwald - the camp that was associated with medical experiments and exterminating communists such as Ernst Thaelmann - he is mysteriously helped by another inmate to survive a serious illness.

Suddenly, the onerous, rain-soaked camp, full of disease and bodies being piled for burial is changed. He walks out into the light and is surrounded by US soldiers.

A sergeant (Daniel Craig) seeks to advise him that he had better seek assistance in Austria than return to Budapest - the obvious reference being that he'd be better off in the West than in the Soviet zone.

Still, his journey of self-discovery isn't finished, the story unfolding to show that he will continue, realising, ironically, that the only Jews to have survived the old life were those who believed that their fate was to suffer.

He, being fateless and stoical, just carries on, surrounded on all sides by those who believed that they were building a new socialist society and those who simply went along for the ride.

However, that's another story.