(I watched this movie completely disconnected from my watch-through of the extended S&S Great Movies list, but then belatedly realized that it’s actually on the list at #243. Whoops, accidentally went out of order; I promise I wasn’t cheating on purpose.)

So look, I’m not going to pretend I’m a Béla Tarr expert here. I’ve only seen one of his movies previously, Sátántangó. But then, that was a seven hour movie, and marinating in someone’s creation for seven hours is a little more intense than just watching a regular movie. And so while I basically know nothing about Tarr’s filmography beyond that one movie, I’m already very comfortable saying that this is extremely in-line with what I would have expected from him.

It starts off in a sad, barren little drinkhole[1], where folks are sitting sullenly before engaging in a weird astronomical dance that our protagonist arranges the patrons into — giving them roles as various astronomical bodies as he sets up an eclipse, narrating the dying of the light and then the sudden blazing back of the sun. As odd as this is, it feels plausibly like a thing that might happen in this bar, not just a thing with thematic echoes of the movie’s main storyline.

From there, the protagonist goes off to a bunch of different locations and does various errands for people in a kindly way. But I don’t want to skip ahead to any of those locations, because the movie certainly doesn’t. The most famous shot of Sátántangó is a long take of people walking down a street while papers blow in a strong breeze; Tarr doesn’t reprise that specific shot, but you will absolutely spend minutes at a time watching people walk from place to place in this movie. (Also in both movies, when a person walks in from the bottom of the screen, the camera might stay fixed until they completely walk over the horizon closer to the top of the screen some minutes later.)

I should note here that while I’ve called this a Béla Tarr movie several times, that isn’t precisely accurate. The movie is actually co-directed by Ágnes Hranitzky, who worked with Tarr as an editor on previous movies; my understanding is that the co-director title (which she would also hold on the next two movies they made together) is less of a change in how they worked and more of a recognition that her role was always larger than that of a traditional editor. So when I say that it has all these elements of continuity with Sátántangó, her creative presence on both movies is presumably a big part of that, even though she wasn’t credited as a co-director of that earlier movie.

Anyway, I don’t want to talk about the plot too much, because there’s not that much of it in the movie — this is just a little over two hours, and once you factor in all the long takes of walking, there’s not much time left for plot events to happen. But suffice to say that it involves the world’s saddest circus coming to town, the crowds that follow it, and the rising nervousness of the people of the town about what those crowds might do. It feels at once like a fable, an allegory, and ripped from the headlines.

Sátántangó holds a weird place in my heart, because I kind of love it and kind of hate it, and feel nothing in between. I genuinely don’t know if it’s brilliant or self-indulgent garbage, and tbh suspect it’s both at the same time. This one is a more normal movie, and I don’t hate it at all — it tones down all the absurd excesses of Tarr’s earlier movie, while keeping almost all of the strengths and wedding them to a more straightforward narrative. I can easily see how this would make someone’s list of top ten movies; good stuff.

As an aside, I watched this as a 4K Criterion disc, and it felt genuinely weird to do so — when I watched Sátántangó years ago, it wasn’t available from any legal source, and I had to grab a torrent with lousy video quality. It being obscure and hard to find seemed almost part of the watching experience itself. Things are just more available these days, though — even Sátántangó has, in the years since then, gotten a restoration and a Blu-ray release and has appeared on streaming services. But there’s some foreshadowing here for what’s coming up when I return to the proper next-up movies on the list.

  1. (This movie, apparently, is not set in any specific location or at any specific time… but it looks exactly like the Hungary of Sátántangó — poor, low-tech, and extremely Eastern European. I’m uncertain about whether this is anything like actual life in Hungary; and if it is at all realistic, whether it’s meant to show contemporaneous (late ’90s) life or to act as a period piece depicting an earlier time.) ↩︎