Watch out, spoilers!
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Despite the fact that I have always liked Hungarian cinema, Béla Tarr’s films were left out of my attention, although I read about them more than once, so I found several of his films that I intend to watch. The first of them is “The Curse” (Kárhozat, 1988).
In some very remote mining, judging by some signs, the town lives a man Carrer (Miklos Sekey), his occupation is also not known, perhaps he helps the local bartender with smuggling, but clearly does not work. He is in love with a rather attractive singer from a local bar called Titanic, despite the fact that she is married and her husband is aware of his feelings, threatening to punish him to the full extent of male retribution. In order to stay with his beloved for a while (sleep with her), he recommends his friend-bartender husband of the singer, mired in debt, as a smuggler. The singer, apparently, has no special feelings for him, just as she does not feel them for anyone, all her thoughts are aimed at getting out of this hole. Soon he becomes convinced of this and himself, as a result, reports on smugglers to the police. That's the whole "complex" story.
The film is, of course, a typical art house, so those who are not friends with it, it is better not to start watching. First of all, here you should pay attention to the visual side – the film is black and white, I would even say gray and white, almost the entire film is raining and we watch for a long time different, sometimes very long shots. Then, of course, the dialogues, or rather, to a greater extent, the monologues of the protagonist, who is expressed in such pseudo-philosophical phrases even sometimes. This can also be attributed to the monologues of one of the heroines - an elderly woman who tries to keep the main character from communicating with the singer, warning him of her negative qualities, which even quotes the Old Testament in one place. Such a simple content can be tied, of course, a lot of different “meanings” (loneliness, meaninglessness of existence, etc.), which, apparently, the author tried to do, but, despite the fact that the film I, although with some difficulty, watched, I can not say that I somehow hurt someone’s feelings there, all this is some kind of creepy nonsense, although I can quite assume that in people’s lives this happens (everything happens in it, as we all know), and the visual series does not cause anything but anguish, apparently, and was conceived. So to compare this film with the films of Antonioni and Tarkovsky, as some critics do, does not occur to me, the characters do not cause any sympathy or interest. But I will try to watch a couple of his films.