Satantango

Tarr's masterpiece and one of the strongest Eastern European films of the '90s: an excruciatingly intense 7 1/2-hour-long black-and-white epic of social decay and collapse. [22 Sep 2006, p.C7]

It’s the cumulative alliance of a number of contrasted themes that reveals the irony of its being: that it’s at once sympathetic and patronizing, both tragic and satiric. And it’s this insidious yet ambiguous political nature that characterizes Sátántangó as a distinctly Hungarian vision, in turn perpetuating its obscurity and qualifying its art.

Béla Tarr is the master of bleakly beautiful but painstakingly leisurely art cinema and this 1994 film is his ultimate challenge. It follows a prophet-like figure who returns to a rundown village, but it’s all about the spell that the crisply desolate images exert.

The subject of this brilliantly constructed narrative is nothing less than the world today, and its 431-minute running time is necessary not because Tarr has so much to say, but because he wants to say it right.

Sátántangó isn’t a mental film or even a psychological one; rather, it’s rather a historical and a metaphysical one, in which the concentration of vast political and social forces on a small village drive the residents to despair, violence, and folly.

Formally in dynamic tension between the claustrophobic intimacy of Tarr's early influence, Cassavetes, and the rigorously choreographed grace of Tarkovsky and Jancsó, this startling, apocalyptic work is sometimes over-extended, but it builds to a powerful, rhythmic climax of breakdown and withdrawal.

A look at the dead-end lives of people in a muddy village in post-Communist Hungary takes patience to watch but is worth effort. [14 Dec 2008, p.52]