Finally reached the epic and Magnum opus Tarra called "Satanic Tango". Before that, I was frightened by his timekeeping at seven o’clock, but for me, watching it came quite easily. As much as he can. We are shown the last days of a once wealthy farm. After the destruction of the socialist camp followed as a result desolation of agriculture. Two residents of this village want to deceive their fellow villagers and leave with all their money. In return, they promise them a new happy life. Strange things are also happening in the village. Irimias, who has been considered dead for six months, suddenly returns. The villagers are awakened by the sound of a bell. All would be fine, but within a radius of many kilometers there is not a single church. And then there is the endless rain that comes and goes. It turns the area around into dirt. That symbolizes what is happening in the souls of the inhabitants. If there was at least one positive character in Tarr’s other film, Verkmeister’s Harmony, then there is no such character. They're no better than the townspeople of Dogville in Trier's film of the same name. Or the characters of "White Ribbon" by Michael Haneke. With the latter, comparisons are so begging. At least the films are different in nature. However, we cannot blame these people. To judge, but not to blame. For in such conditions as the characters of “Satanic Tango” live, it is simply impossible to be kind and responsive. When the land where you live denies it. When parents do not care about their children and they do not lay in them the basic norms of goodness and morality. This, by the way, is just one of the novels of the picture. In general, there are many side story arches, so that we look at the hard life of residents from different sides. There are also very long plans in the film. Some are ten minutes long, which is the longest in cinema. Most of the time, we watch characters do things in real time. For example, if someone goes to the store, then Tarr shows it without editing glues. The film is completely ascetic, where the form tells us much more content. And the canvas itself can be interpreted in different ways and I think I will review it more than once. Meanwhile, Satan dances his tango both during and after the painting. This is the most tango hidden in many places. In meanness, deception and lies between people.
This picture will not dare to see the absolute majority of people. You know, for almost 5 hours of the film, I knew for sure that I would come in and leave a negative review and a 2 out of 10 rating for a couple of beautiful shots and the fact that there was such a long work. And towards the end, I began to realize that this film, firstly, shows how not to do and, secondly, awakens conflicting emotions in you.
Honestly, I (like many others who watched) can hardly remember the events and understand what the film was about, but this stuff filled with life’s dirt makes you think as much as Malevich’s Black Square. Is it worthy of its existence? Did I waste 7 and a half hours directing this movie? After all, what is art and why can't I NOT rank "tango" among it?
What can be aesthetic about a child torturing a cat, killing it, and poisoning himself? Where is the beauty in how people walk for half an hour on a blurred road, then another half an hour to pour vodka into glasses? At one point it will seem that in no village, even the most remote, such a depressing situation can take place. Critics and “connoisseurs” make us believe that this is the life of ordinary peasants, but this is a real hell, a place where people decompose during life. This is the “aesthetic of violence” that many people like, but for me it remains unacceptable and unjustified.
It is this inconsistency that makes it meaningful. Not a superficial plot, not a meager directorial work, but the fact of existence.
It's a completely different kind of movie. It’s not designed to raise a problem, show life drama, or entertain you. Aside from the obvious reason to grab as many awards as possible, it makes you think (otherwise than, for example, Schindler's List). And just because he made the audience analyze and philosophize, we can say that this film is art. And for the drinking grandfather, of course.
I do not recommend it if you have never thought about the meaning of life, looking at a white canvas with one stroke of paint.
4 out of 10
"Satanic Tango" is a grand in its misanthropy film. Behind the occasion for oozing hatred and examples of hopeless ignorance, Bela Tarr goes to the people, to the inhabitants of a small farm.
Going to the people is an old practice to which intellectuals have repeatedly turned. Dangerous immersion in the small abyss in search of new meanings and authentic folk spirituality is especially characteristic of the authors of the silver age of Russian literature. Poems of the poet-popular Nikolai Klyuev, the novel “Silver Dove” by Andrei Bely, the passing language of the novel “Fire” by Pimen Karpov and many other treasures of Russian literature address this topic. “Satanic Tango” stands out against their background for the exceptional pessimism and destructive nature of Bela Tarr’s findings in the life of the deep people. There is no spirituality or natural beauty here, but there is a murderous stupidity reaching the pinnacle of degeneration in satanic dance.
Enlightened Buddhists practice the contemplation of the continuous decay and decay of the phenomena surrounding them, Bela Tarr suggests doing the same only with an adjustment for the macroscale and seven-hour timekeeping.
Children suffer the most from degenerate life, Bela Tarr managed to reflect this in the main image of the whole film - the girls Esticke. It is she who observes the satanic dance through the window, which brings her to the extreme point.
The suffering of a little girl is a heavy, highly sentimental image. And only outstanding masters are able to cope with its worthy embodiment. This was possible Dostoevsky with his Matryona from "Demons" and not so famous Netochka Nezvanova. An interesting postmodern interpretation was the “last Soviet writer” Ilya Masodov. The heroines of all his novels – little girls – went through grotesque and terrible suffering, but later found revenge in posthumous ultraviolence. The heroine of his novel “The Darkness of Your Eyes” Sonya begins her posthumous existence with the murder of a cat, which brings her together with Ashtika.
Bela Tarr still slightly softens the tragic fate of the girl with a deep voiceover monologue, and the cattle will later get what they deserve, but her frantic look to nowhere and a long journey with a dead cat will be remembered for a long time.
The only more or less positive character in the film is a local doctor. His huge, sick and clumsy body will rise from the chair in seven and a half hours only for two reasons: it is the end of alcohol and the bell ringing. According to Bela Tarr, this is the only possible way to make a conscientious intellectual living among the people, which does not distinguish him too much from the locals.
In addition to the conscientious intellectual in the “Satanic Tango” there is his opposite – a young fraudster Irimiash – a kind of Ostap Bender, collecting cash surplus from the local population. Radical-terrorist motives sometimes break through in his speech, but their practical implementation remains behind the scenes. He doesn’t just make money from suckers while working for the system, he wants to make money through explosives and anarchy. But Bela Tarr does not allow even a ray of hope for change for the better to break through. His film is about total hopelessness. The demoralized mob will be chewed up by the city, the last intellectual will bombard the windows of his house, and the village madman will tirelessly ring the bell, feeling the imminent end.
Dirt is life, and life is dirt.
If you want to experience the metaphysical horror of being a little differently, then buy a good wine, barricade yourself in a room, lower the curtains and turn on Satantango.
Do not leave the room for seven and a half hours.
Somewhere in another universe, it rains all the time, there are fogs, and the winds have burned the entire landscape.
The film begins with a grandiose scene of the movement of cows, then entropy absorbs into a black hole, it is difficult to understand where you are and where the film is.
Is it a movie or another reality? Hard to say.
It is important to forget about the existence of time and dive into the universe of Bela Tarr. If you can, you can enjoy watching animals.
These beautiful long canvases where nothing happens, madness, unhappy, lost people, and howling of the wind.
Rain is like acid, erodes everything, and perspective in this forgotten place is a lack of perspective. Back view, front view, what’s the difference?
Everything is the same and everywhere is water.
The bell has not ringed for a long time, and if you hear it, it seems to you.
Rare cinephiles, who watched 'Tango' to the end, are proud of this and call viewing one of the most memorable in life. Of course, there are also hypnotic moments associated primarily with the use of Mihai Viga’s music, which is even better here than in The Curse. However, Tarr’s decision to film Krasnahorkai’s novel almost page-by-page, prudishly, literally (by the way, the words “from the author” are incredibly poetic) was a serious mistake, primarily of a cinematic nature.
As it seems at first, conceptually and atmospherically, "Satanic Tango" does not add anything fundamentally new to "The Curse": the loop of everyday life is tightened tightly around the neck of the heroes, leaving them neither prospects nor hopes. Here we are dealing with episodes in which different, almost unrelated characters act, (which later will still be connected), exhausting the viewer, often static, the camera of Medvid moves in Tango quite rarely, travel is stingier, much is filmed from one point.
The film features multiple versions of the same events, and it, like the novel, develops as the dance indicated in the title, from beginning to end and from end to beginning. In any case, there are distinct Becket connotations, guessable in the novel Krasnahorkai, when the characters are waiting for something that does not happen, and time all lasts.
The second part of “Satanic Tango” is more dynamic than the first, completes its almost half-hour dance in the beer hall, where bizarrely, due to the constant change of narrative optics, disparate narrative lines converge. The preceding dance, the same tango from the title, the story of a girl, joylessly, through a window looking at her future, is able to touch even the most consistent misanthrope. Krasnahorkai and Tarr, introducing the figure of a girl into the compositional structure of the picture, act like Platonov in Kotlovan: they give the heroes and the viewer hope, and then take it back.
Happy is the cinephile who does not stop watching Satanic Tango after the first part of it – he will be rewarded with a piercing climax in the beer hall, when the cyclical nature of tango becomes in his eyes a metaphor for all human life. Even in The Curse, long travel around the house captures people trapped in its walls, it goes full circle and returns to the same place, becoming a symbol of the repeatability of life, the same eternal return that Nietzsche called “a heavy burden”. In 2012, Kira Muratova in “Eternal Return” will humorously express herself on the topic of the repetition of everything and everything, not without bitterness, but with a bright smile. “Satanic Tango” as in principle and all the work of Bela Tarr, unfortunately, is completely devoid of irony, humor.
Realism, even the naturalism of this seven-hour picture, which seeks to capture the duration of life processes as close as possible to reality, is able to alienate the viewer with its immanence, because any symbolism is transcendental in relation to the literal meaning of the depicted. “Satanic Tango” is a maximalist film and therefore extremely hopeless, it fixes the cyclical nature of material existence, the everyday circle of cares and deeds of heroes who are not interested in either art, science or the Divine.
The automatism of their existence, completely closed by everyday life, makes their life a hell (as Nietzsche said: “Art is given to us in order not to die of the truth”, that is what the heroes suffer from). Satanic Tango reveals its secrets gradually, involving the viewer not immediately, but step by step, but being immersed in this film, it is impossible to get out of it.
Unfolding in a village, in the suffocating mud of impassable roads, Satanic Tango is, in my opinion, Tarr's most realistic painting at the time, neither the documentaryism of Family Nest nor the aesthetic of Autumn Almanac. Here the subject environment puts pressure on the person, the characters are looking for salvation in money, hoping to one day get out of this hole. Tarr pulls to the last to not include death in the space of his films (heroes do not even talk about it), but still makes this step in his seven-hour epic, which is very revealing.
Death here, as in Plato’s Kotlovan, affects someone who is just beginning to live, and strangely enough, it is able to disturb the ocean of apathy of heroes, push on a path that defends human dignity. In the third and most plotted part of The Satanic Tango, we see the intrusion of an alien realistic fabric of a symbolic element associated with Jeremiah’s projects. From this point on, many episodes are biblically colored, such as the exodus from the village, but Jeremiah is neither the Messiah, nor the false Messiah, nor Christ, nor the Antichrist. It is rather a social projector in the spirit of Bender, it will not deceive, but will not give anything.
The picture of Tarr ends in the house of the Doctor, suddenly breaking the narrative threads with other characters: the closing of windows and the symbolic end of the world in one creative head, the closure of the circle of life and the story itself evoke Beckett’s Endgame. At the same time, the collapse of the narrative universe of “Satanic Tango” in the head of the one who created it hints at another parallel – “Providence” by René, where a sick, alcohol-poisoned consciousness tried to assemble the world disintegrating in the imagination into a single whole.
And this is already, I think, an intertextual connection, conducted not by Krasnahorkai, but by Tarr himself: the sinophile nature of a seemingly realistic film, the symbolism of which for the time being seems foreign, is truly stunning. It turns out that before us the picture is about a carousel of meanings, their dance in a separate head, about an attempt to express reality in fiction, the border between which is lost. So realism becomes psychedelia, it is all the more surprising that in seven hours the viewer is ready to curse the director for the lengths, and in the end it turns out that they are justified. Just as thoughts get confused in the head, floating one on top of another, so the storylines of “Satanic Tango” mix, forming an insoluble knot.
This once again proves that these worlds were created by men, not by God, with whom everything is harmonious until human freedom is woven into the design. Many filmmakers, especially those in Hollywood, are trying to do things like God — logically, consistently, clearly, but that’s funny because they’re not gods. Tarr and Krasnahorkai, along with Medvid and Vig, create an intricate universe that primarily expresses the complexity of human consciousness. “Satanic Tango” is not just an ambitious film that ignores the rules of the cinematic language defiantly and defiantly, it is also a breakthrough to what Deleuze called “brain cinema”, to which René referred.
We can say that Satanic Tango is a film about how the fictional world is structured by the creator, but it can not be assembled, because the creator is not all-powerful. The audience of “Satanic Tango”, as well as its characters, who are in a state of suspended animation, a kind of cinematic nirvana, pulled out of the world, turned into bare sight without a single thought in their heads under the power of the magic of cinema, can only wait for the end of this seven-hour marathon, which, like life, is not finished.
Shocking, burning illusions, drying up the subtile stems of hope for tomorrow; captivating mercilessly cruel realism; throwing his face on the floor in the dust; immersed in the endless Selinovskaya journey to the edge of the night, which began so long ago that no one can remember the point of departure or the accompanying circumstances; pressing the uncontested weakness, the insignificance of human existence, fatal slavery, the power of the grays, to be replaced only by black; revelling in slow decay and eating bones of the decay of the dark, but still weak in the background of the spiritual life, which Kamashes us, but is still weak, but still in the background of the spiritual, but the world, but the world, which is not only to fall. A collective farm that has become obsolete in recent days, which is covered by a landslide of decades of another choked regime. Black and white, incredibly bright... The extreme expressiveness of the breathed down and the squeezed dying moans of those who have lost the message to call for help. The incredible colorfulness of the imminent death, the rat poison that etched all the colors, broke the paws of those trying to get up. The same fate, absolute uselessness, despair. And a feast during the plague...
Long plans in the spirit of Tarkovsky and Mizoguchi, exaggerated the shocking cruelty of a completely genuine reality, the view in which sinks very slowly, and from which the frame of Bela Tarr will not let you leave and make you see the agony, despair, hopelessness, madness, in which nothing is cut at all ... You will have to see the real thing... No rush... And no attempt to aestheticize the ashes... All seven hours - no chance to rest. Extreme close-ups for a few minutes, every time making us think, what in these lost in the swamps and blurred roads of the perishing land faces ...
Refusal to play professional actors, rejection of the dominance of the narrative, refusal to explain, refusal to prescribe the stories of characters who do not have stories at all, almost complete rejection of the help of music, for the sake of creating a clear reflection of the frames, leading to the highest degree of realism, in which landscapes and faces will never lie in seven hours. Infinite long plans suspended in the grid to the ceiling, we observe this perfectly sustained in its style perspective, this picture, with gone to an invisible distance frame, which included everywhere trying to fall on us walls with collapsed plaster, rusted utensils, weaving during our sleep a pattern of webs over the heads of arachnids, measurably strolling animals under which people mimicked ... Perhaps since his birth... Slide into this woven web together - Tarr invites us there.
In the world of Bela Tarra, the heavy ringing of the bells is replaced by the tapping of glasses, which, like everything else around, brings no relief.
Dulled pain that can not be poured with alcohol, cadaveric rigor, from which the ugly body of the neighbor’s wife no longer warms, extinguished souls, drooping faces, who have long not even complained of depression, filling the plate of the cooled soup of lives, into which drunken and exhausted faces fall, retaining belonging to the human race only as a courteous formality that their likes can give them ...
A perfected death meditation in which we are moving as fast as Ashtika, going on a suicide in an abandoned building with her dead cat, hoping that she will finally be released from this Satanic dance, thinking that she knows what happened and what will be better next. She is the only one who finds the way... No detail that stands out that distracts from this meditation, in which we see millimeters of Tarr’s floating frame, there is no one and nothing bad, nothing good: only one, hopeless, useless. 150 long plans of immersion in the spirit of Herman, which do not tend to lie
The only person in the district, somehow educated and with interests and at least some feelings, turns out to be the one who completely refused to fight. Everyone is trying to survive, just like animals or flowers that perform an incomprehensible function. The doctor responds only with escapism, hatred, refusal to leave the house for months to finally, without breaking off the neck of a bottle of palinka, to pin down a window that poisons the rays of light falling on the womb of the cobweb from the outside, and submissively accept death.
Futaki, a little less cowardly and a little more intelligent than the rest, able to understand that now every step is only the rhythm of the satanic tango, in which six steps back or forward the floor on a miserable local bar, on which he taps his stick into the rhythm of the swinging pendulum of death, the measured course of which is felt by everyone. Futaki, still feeling the stale smell that has penetrated into every corner, brought by the endless rain like the poverty of the peasants, goes into emptiness, just as a herd of cattle goes there in the first long frame, devoid of even a hint of faith. Dissolves in the emptiness of the swamps and grayness of the country, in love for which he hardly audiblely confesses to himself, in which the corrupt and bit off his head along with the torso of the nomenklatura does not cease to cause slave piety among those who swim to the edge of the night.
God, who has entered through a hole in heaven, will not give real hope, but will take away the latter, condemn it to even more humiliating rot, will dot all the i in the images of his people - stupid, weak, depraved, with insignificant abilities. According to God, they will be written about them in papers that no one will ever read, which will be shoved into a closet, where for decades piles of such papers about worthless people are folded and folded, not worth mentioning and at the same time making up the whole essence of life.
The 12 steps of tango show all the betrayals, lies, indifference, stupidity in which the community is mired, and ironically show the people at the end baring their weapons in the form of blind faith in the authority of the ruler who appeared out of nowhere. Belief in this wasteland is only a mockery smile. It cannot be lost, but nothing can be gained with such faith either. The result is unmistakably hinted at by the opening film 10-minute close-up. Dissolving in the abyss of fields blurred by endless rains of poverty, burying and trying to warm up along the way for a new dose of alcohol in the crumbling abandoned wretched buildings, flowing into an infinitely deep and black gutter, choking in their own helplessness and petty intrigues, falling further and further...
“Satanic Tango” is not a long one. It is just this: very demanding to attention, concentration, patience, making a lot of thinking, depressive.
The epic canvas, drawn by 150 slow long shots of Bella Tarr, brilliantly illustrates what the director and author of this grotesque story, Laszlo Krasnahorkai, wanted to show. This sketch is perfect, and you do not need to throw anything out of it.
The film produces a shocking effect, carries a magnetic attraction and unstoppable force. The Hungary we see on the screen is still alive. “Satanic tango” exaggerates and exaggerates, but a dull sense of hopelessness is the cultural backdrop of life in Hungary. Hungarian cinema is difficult to perceive without the experience of living in these realities. However, the opus magnum of Bela Tarr is very strong unique, epic, thoroughly worked out form, as well as created by the director of the film language.
“It’s hard, it’s hard, and it’s worse, and it’s ugly.”
You're a girl. You're thirteen or fifteen. You know that whatever you do is for the best. The day before, you buried coins to grow a money tree. You may be an idiot, they tell you so, but I don't think you really are. You're just looking for beauty and you can't see her. Drinking, washing, chewing. They are waiting for a prophet or an auditor. Just gogol waiting, with fading figures.
Gija, boots, rain. Always. It’s beautiful too, but something is missing. You're not the type to run away from home. And if you come back, you're gonna get shot. You know that. You can't run away. But today you killed a cat. The day before she was lying on your lap and purring, but then you decided to kill her. Tortured, skated, promised and killed. Because you're looking for beauty and you can't see it anywhere.
The cat in the hand, the cat in the net, the cat in the bowl with poison, the cat is dead. Now you can go and bury it by the money tree. Or at least check to see if it has sprouted. A tree. Have you made a sacrifice, haven’t you?
Nope. It didn't sprout. You go to a brother who is unclean to you and dishonest. Or who is he to you? And then dear. All the way to the field. In your hands is the corpse of a cat, it's stiffened, hardened. It hangs under your arm like a tourist mat. The paws of a cat do not bend normally gently, the hair somehow melded, protruding ears are now only you. The corpse is expressionless as it is.
There's no white or black. There's dark gray and light gray. And brown. And the cat was grey. And it was gray. Or brown. It doesn't really matter. And you were merging with the wall when you pressed in and watched it die, putting your head in a bowl of milk and freezing, all of a sudden. Beautiful?
Then you're going to die, and you're right. Absolutely right.
I would put 12, if possible, the picture, but, nevertheless, let me give advice.
This winter, during a regular weekend, I suddenly came across a YouTube video of Les Joyaux De La Princesse for the song Exode, this is a musical project of a French friend. And as a video sequence, there was a cut, taken entirely from this movie. I didn’t know anything about it at the time and thought it was just a music video shot by a director, a musician, or a YouTube user, as is now customary. And I ran for a whole week like a rabid man with this video and showed everyone who felt anything. He said, “Well, that’s easy, right?” Nope? Not everyone, okay. And so, six months later, one of these feeling suddenly came, (at least on this site to the honor of saying), on the footage from the film and realized that the clip was cut from this film. So we decided to watch it together. And we do not regret, although the director genuinely and undoubtedly mocks the viewer. And he does it right, because it may seem to the viewer that beauty is not visible, and this is not so.
In short, I advise you to read the clip first, it takes 11 minutes, not 455. It is beautiful and will give you an idea of what you are going to get into. 455 minutes is a long time. That's more than seven hours of viewing. If you like the clip, welcome to the idiot club I'm in. You will not be the same after watching. Well, if not, no, I don't recommend it.
The first impression of a person is formed within seven seconds. Features of appearance and behavior lay in these moments the foundation on which our assessment of his activity and personality will be based. In the part of auteur cinema where Bela Tarr reigns, time flows much more slowly, sometimes turning back. The Hungarian director spends about seven minutes on a prologue acquaintance shot with one plan, but without a single word. It gives you the opportunity to look through the half-open door into the black and white world, as if specially created so that under the howling of the wind and the alarming sounds of the ambient wandered through the mud of the cow. The viewer shakes an outstretched hand with mixed feelings, but he is already morally ready to listen to a story that will take the narrator more than seven hours of screen time.
Futaki, awakened by the dawn bells, approaches the window and contemplates the joyless landscape. The nearest chapel, located eight kilometers from the village, was destroyed during the war. “I’m sure something must happen today,” he tells his mistress, but the conversation is interrupted by her husband’s sudden return. Hiding in the next room, Futaki accidentally reveals Schmidt’s criminal intentions: he and his accomplice will leave the village this night, taking with them the commune’s money from the sale of livestock. Carefully out on the street, Futaki stands against the wall around the corner, in a matter of minutes to return and try through blackmail to enter the share. Meanwhile, over the heroes of the story, clouds are thickening, brought along with the news of the imminent return to the farm of a mysterious and unbearably charismatic fraudster with the appearance of Christ; Irimiash, who was considered dead, has a reputation as a “magician” and in addition catches up with people with primitive fear, the reasons for which the viewer can only guess.
Gradually, the narrative becomes more complex, but the breakdown into titled episodes greatly facilitates the analysis. In the second chapter, the filmmakers make a spatio-temporal leap to tell us about the actions Irimias took in parallel with the events of the first scenes. In the third chapter on stylized binocular frames appears looking out the window Futaka, he is looking for the source of the bell ringing. The familiar picture takes on a new perspective. The doctor, a fat and old drunk, spends his days in constant surveillance of neighbors, fixing other people's actions and his thoughts on paper. “Early in the morning he looked out the window and was scared. Futaki is terrified, he is afraid of death. It starts to rain. It will not stop until spring.” Structural maze should not scare off attentive moviegoers, the architectural beauty of “Satanic Tango” is a brilliant synthesis of grace and simplicity. The film, divided into 12 chapters, repeats the scheme of popular dance (six steps forward, six steps back), transferred over time. Other good news is that the director leaves very limited scope for interpretation, as he denies any symbolism and insists that each scene should be taken literally. However, the unprepared viewer, lost in the cliches of perception, even when getting acquainted with a sealed art house, risks facing a number of difficulties. Visitors to multiplexes are trained on the most obvious way of interacting with cinema - to absorb stories, literary stories, decorated with moving pictures and background sound. “Satanic Tango” has a crystal clear and fascinating plot, and this is a great merit of Laszlo Krasnahorkai, the author of the novel, which became a source of inspiration for the director. However, one can only witness a cinematic miracle by going beyond the study of history. It is worth remembering that Tarr is not so much a storyteller as an artist, and an artist who gravitates towards pure aesthetics. The author speaks openly about this in many interviews. This is the key to understanding his work.
“Satanic Tango” is the finest matter, woven from calibrated mise-en-scene, extremely long plans, devastated landscapes and theatrical action. It is necessary to pay close attention to the movement of the camera: how the operator enters the characters into the frame, changes plans, without resorting to zooming. Of course, the location for the shooting was chosen in such a way as to exactly correspond to the spirit of the author’s message, it performs the same function as Raskolnikov’s apartment in Crime and Punishment. The technical aspect of Tarr is soldered into the content, even the structure openly interacts with the audience's emotions. The inhabitants of the farm, who made a drink in a tavern, are forgotten in a bacchic dance to an endlessly repeated melody. One tries to start a fight, lying on a bench, the other, making ritual movements, persistently grabs another’s wife by the chest, the third wanders nearby, demonstrating to others a grandiose talent, which consists in the ability to hold cheese roll on the forehead without the help of hands. This ten-minute scene has an important sticker in the middle: the pale face of the distraught young heroine of the previous chapter in the window returns the viewer to reality, he immediately recalls that a tragedy of cosmic scale is unfolding very near.
Hardworking people living on a once thriving farm. As a result of illiterate treatment, the land around the farm has become salty and unusable. The farmers sold the remaining livestock. But for each of them to start a new life, money is not enough. There was a rumor that Irimiash and Petrina, who died a year and a half ago, appeared. And then the bells ring, and the temple is not near. And the conductor allegedly had a revelation, his fiction, about the importance of the figure of Irimiash, fanning interest in his personality. From the resurrected, everyone expects miracle and salvation.
I feel so sorry for the people in this movie. People wandering in the cold, autumn rain. I feel sorry for everyone. Yes, sinful, wicked and miserable. Very relevant for Russia. This is our life. And girls on the roadside, in the cold, in thin tights. And a drunken intelligentsia, in the person of a doctor. Farmers, uneducated, dark, but everyone thinks they are smart and cunning. I sympathize with the dissolute mother of a girl who cannot love her daughter. A girl, unwanted, unloved, beaten by her mother, deceived by her brother, humiliated. The cat was so sorry, the heart was bleeding. And when the girl died, it was pathetic less. That's who we are. My neighbor is a kind woman, feeds dogs in the yard, buys them cookies. The neighbor stole her patty from the pan, so she lamented all day. And the tango in the inn, nothing compared to our corporate parties, only their music is better. And they have the same fun as in every company: some are honorably noble, others with all the breadth of a restless soul, so that in the morning they are ashamed, others joke as they can, and some sit aside and look with sober eyes at this whole nativity. People are like people. I sympathize with a loving woman who agrees with the warmth of her large body to warm everyone who everyone uses and nobody likes. I understand the fear of Futaka, who is terminally ill and fearful of death: No, the real threat comes from the ground. Suddenly, one of them is afraid of silence, stops moving, clamps in a corner, where he feels safe. Chewing causes pain, swallowing becomes agony. Then everything slows down until finally...the worst, stillness, comes. The circle is closing. Who knows? I could live to the end of my life, and instead I must go to this stinking hell.” I sympathize with the spider innkeeper, who lives far away from his family, who bought a spider inn, who lost his business: 'Here are the bastards. Anything that's still, they're going to mess it up. I could've spent my life with a rag. Table legs, window, door joint, ... drawers. Nothing will come of it.” I sympathize with the hardworking, blind alcoholic Khalich: “You will get wet, inside and out.” You certainly haven't heard of inland rain. They wash your organs day and night. Come from the heart ... and wash your kidneys, spleen, stomach and liver. I'm soaked. A glass of wine could help. I feel for the homeless, homeless Irimias and Petrina. The captain, when he recruited them, ranted about freedom and order, citing Pericles as an example. [Pericles, 400 BC, ruler of the heyday of Athens.] The political and economic growth of the state coincides with the flowering of culture and art. Such a coincidence has happened only once in the history of mankind. Democracy is possible only with a super talented leader. The freedom of citizens and the state order Pericles considered the basis of public life. Pericles said: “It is not a handful of people who govern our city, but the majority of the people; in private affairs everyone enjoys equal rights, everyone is promoted to honorable positions with dignity.” We develop our inclinations to beauty without waste, and we indulge in the sciences without detriment to the strength of the spirit. Each of us, by himself, can easily and gracefully manifest his personality in the most diverse conditions of life, and that my statement is not empty chatter, but the true truth, is proved by the very power of our city. But, as a result, he finished: It all depends on my mood. You have no choice but to cooperate. I'm actually making you an offer. From now on, you both work for me or I'll have to say you have no choice. I sympathize with the employees of the bodies engaged in unnecessary and sometimes disgusting work.
The people in the film are compared to cattle. Cows and bulls who are driven to slaughter, and they copulate on the way. Horses who are suddenly free and do not know what to do with this freedom. Compared to pigs digging in the mud. It is a pity that under the rug, unsightly faces, poor situation we do not see living, suffering, lost people. People without guidance, leadership, support. God-forsaken people. People who think they are important, the crowns of nature, that something depends on them. But in fact, trusting toys are in the hands of others. As a girl who believes in the resurrection of a cat, in the money tree, we believe in MMM, free cheese. We believe in all kinds of people and trust them with our lives. When we hear the bells of hope, it may well be that the madman is hitting the iron. Doctor: "I must have lost my mind, I mistook the funeral bell for the ringing of heavenly bells." After winter, spring always comes and gives us hope.
10 out of 10
There are three things you can look at endlessly: how the fire burns, how the water flows ... and the hypnotic footage of Bela Tarr's films. Metaphysics, which arises from elementary contemplation, simply stuns and through the monotony of long planes sees life itself. Few people managed to capture almost a document of reality on the screen, the genius Hungarian managed to do this.
The latest film classic among the greatest authors of the 20th century, along with Dreyer, Bergman, Bresson, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, he speaks the same language of silent signs and subconscious counterpoints as his distinguished European counterparts. They either love it or they hate it. And the seven-hour Satanic Tango is certainly the last great film of the first century of cinema.
What’s interesting is that “Satantango” is the flesh of 90s cinema, if not the perfect film of the decade. In it you can find parallels with Kusturica, and with Kaurismäki, and with Jarmusch, and even (oh kinogod!) with Quentin Tarantino, the Hungarian film is built in the same mosaic inconsistency of episodes as Pulp Fiction, released in the same 94th. At the same time, Tarr follows the national tradition of Hungarian cinema, and the slowness of the “floating camera” and does resemble the “film ballets” of his compatriot Miklós Janczó.
An unpretentious story about a farmer’s commune and annual revenue, where everyone tries to deceive everyone and even themselves, grows closer to the end in a biblical parable with elements of magical realism and existential poetics. In the center of which is the “fallen angel” Jeremiah, the last hope of the “forsaken” villagers. Dirt, grayness, drunkenness, suicide, constant rain, allusions to the collapse of the socialist camp and the utopia of the “world of capital” are diluted with an unhealthy dose of black humor and the sweltering accordion theme “Galicia” authored by Michai Viga (Jeremias played in the film the legend of the underground rock scene of Hungary).
In the era of consciousness-clip Bela Tarr goes his own way, accused by many critics-enemies in the absence of talent as such. After the filming of “Turin’s Horse” in 2011, he announced his retirement from the cinema and probably did the right thing. There is no point in scattering beads in front of the viewer in 3-D glasses, because the reality that could almost be “feeled” and created by the Hungarian director, almost nobody is interested.
P.S. It is believed that it is impossible to transfer to the language of cinema Marquez's novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude", after watching "Satantango" you understand that it is possible to do this, the finale of Tarr's film (albeit shot on another work) in the form of some invisible rhymes is consonant with the incredible ending of the novel of the classic of Latin American literature.
10 out of 10
From film to film, Hungarian director Bela Tarr recreates on the screen an extremely gloomy world of drunken people imprisoned in a personal hell. I see Tarr in all the characters in his films. Angry at himself and Others, an East European wrinkled old man filming drunk faces in a slightly more attractive black and white. Despite dissatisfaction with the world around him, this old man manages to shoot an absolutely perfect movie, so harmonious in form that it creates a kind of magnetism and counteraction to the hopelessness that pours out on us from the screen.
Western critics like to put Tarr’s paintings on a par with Tarkovsky, but the similarity here is only technical, expressed in an ultra-slow rhythm. That's what unites them. Tarr's characters are God-forsaken people, and this makes them the antipodes of Tarkovsky's heroes. They live as if by inertia, the spirit blows somewhere nearby, and all this frozen screen time is only a moment before the final death. The body continues to move, mechanically spewing into the dirty void of late autumn foul-smelling smoke. The camera long shows a girl who has poisoned all the cats around from boredom, here she is carrying another corpse of an unfortunate animal, but she is no more alive than this cat. Since she saw the excavated stash of money, it turned into a grave for her and she realized who she had left to poison with the remains of rat poison.
It is impossible to imagine that the people existing in the world of Satanic Tango, stubbornly convulsively twitching in a drunken dance, would ever change. It's hard to believe that there's anything in the world we've been shown besides these few dilapidated houses and a bar. The characters move inside their world as aimlessly as the cows in the first scene of the film. It is useless for them to seek salvation or rebirth because there is nothing behind these foggy fields. Enterprising businessman Irimias feels quite comfortable, and can sculpt anything from these desperate people. Their clouded consciousness makes no doubt that the money given will bring them redemption without any spiritual movement of which they seem no longer capable.
The question of why it was shot and who will appreciate this simultaneously brilliant and unbearable seven-hour film is difficult to answer. However, despite all the existential horror that the film is capable of causing, its contemplative endurance is admirable, and the spirit is still strangely present in the frame, not in people, but as if watching the camera for a dying world, which is preparing to be reborn in something better after another winter.
7 out of 10
A bad movie, because not a movie, but still a movie.
Candyman!
Candyman!
Bela Tarr ...
You may think that this is a frivolous review, because it is like a great film, and it burns in red, but this is far from the case (it is just exaggerated). I have never been so serious, because I have a lot of thoughts about this masterpiece (ranked over 8) by comrade Bela Tarr. I’m not going to write to you like everything that it goes 7 hours and it’s impossible to watch – it’s all nonsense, because TV shows go longer if you watch them several episodes a day. I saw it a few weeks ago and have not been able to get it out of my mind since. That’s why I started writing this review. Accumulated ...
Dead field. Silent trees. There's dirt all around in the truest sense of the word. There's no one around and the camera will show us all that, but never trust the camera because there's a person behind it (possibly even with a cigar and it's not Tinto Brass). On the mud is Mikhail Boyarsky, that is, some man in a hat and a mustache. Next to him is the alcoholic from any movie Aki Kaurismäki. They're going to a village called E, K, L, M, Neika. It will be 30 minutes, but our heroes will still walk on this liquid (from the rain) mud. After a few hours they will get there, and then the villagers will walk back through the mud. So the whole movie is over. And you say 7 hours.
Of course, I’m very fiddly now, because during this time, director Bela Tarr will still show a few hours of the life of the villagers. But he better not show it. There is no love here because one heroine cheats on her husband. There is no compassion for the elderly here, because the chief old man of the village constantly drinks and hates everyone, and also carries some nonsense. There are kids in the movie, but you hate them the most. Adult girls sit in the warehouse and spread their legs (the old man was naturally offered). And a little girl takes a kitten in her hands, breaks his paws and beats his nose into a plate of milk, and then poisons him altogether. One hate all around. It would have been better if he had actually shown one rain.
Why show such dirt? Why show dirt if there's no way out? Why does the old man score boards at the end of the movie, but because there is no way out? Bela Tarr has no choice but to live in the mud and live. I am washing my hands! This movie leaves such a rotten smell inside. It's like you've been eating dirt for 7 hours. I don’t like movies when things are bad, but that’s your problem. The exit must be always and everywhere. A director who removes dirt for dirt is a bad director!
There is Takeshi Kitano, whose solution is death, that is, the characters of his paintings often die, because for them death is a way out of the mud. There's Marco Ferreri, who didn't like people, but his paintings had caustic humor and irony. He laughed at people and blessed a woman because she was for him a way out of the mud (we understand that not always of course, but there was a way out). Bela Tarr's exit? You live badly, but you can wait a few hours and it will get worse. Because an alcoholic with Boyarsky will come and take your money. I think Mel Brooks had a movie called "Life Shit." This is what Tango should have been called.
Who's Satan? He would be scared to live with people like that in a place like this. Ironically, zero again. And most importantly, there are people who say that life is before us. Read the title of the review again. This is a movie where a minute of screen time corresponds to a minute of real life, and this is no longer a movie (because where it is seen at all). And if there's life in front of us, then why does a little girl think like any adult in Bergman's movies? Satanic tango is the filthy absurdity of cinema. The film I found only one plus - a good job of the operator. All! There are no actors (walking on mud and I can go back and forth)! Directing, no! No way out (the bell scene is revealing)!
Maybe I just didn’t grow up to this great masterpiece, but I think it’s crazy to admire a film that gives you nothing but negative emotions. I go to Rostix, drive a Mercedes, watch movies on huge plasma, buy pirated Tarr discs and worry about the characters of Satanic Tango. Aren't you funny? It’s an exaggerated irony, but I’m not allowed to admire this movie. I don’t want to offend anyone, but to say that this film is a masterpiece (how hard life is in addition), and then forget about it and crack popcorn under the new Batman is heresy.
Did you know before this movie that there are abandoned villages all over the world where people die in the mud and alone? You did! Tarr didn't tell us anything new. He is an ordinary director who once every 5 years goes to some villages and makes a movie about human grief, and then goes to the festival for awards. What else is there to talk about? I think the person who picked up the kitten on the street did more good than the person who made the movie. It’s just my subjective opinion, and if you did find something good in this film, then I’m really happy for you because I couldn’t.
P.S.
The Satanic Tango - 1994!
The Turin Horse is 2011!
Life is shit!
Nothing changes...
What about a movie in which two hours of screen time sometimes correspond to two hours of a character’s life? And in seven and a half hours, are the events of two incomplete days shown? If the concept of "another movie" has the right to exist, then "Satanic Tango" is the apotheosis of another movie. Gus Van Sant in the Cube, Jim Jarmusch in the tenth power and Antonioni multiplied by 666 - this is what "Satanic Tango" is. In this film, the limit beyond which there can only be a black square of Malevich from cinema is reached.
What happens on the screen is like a hypnosis session. Instead of a pendulum, there's continuous rain. Instead of the hypnotist, the desert landscapes of the farm. The whole soundtrack is a dull accordion, occasionally breaking the oppressive silence and noise of rain. All this plunges into some kind of trance and consciousness stops working. Perception goes to the subconscious level. The old doctor gave himself an injection and stares silently out the window. The camera looks out the window for 15 minutes with him. With a heavy foot, he goes to the warehouse for a drink - the camera stumbles after half an hour. From hour to hour, you watch cows graze in the meadow, hogs sip water from the poultry, dogs run through the mud, and people non-stop drinking and plotting against each other. And somewhere near, in this godforsaken land, in an atmosphere of complete stagnation and despair, Satan dances his tango.
Surprisingly, the film looks relatively light, as easily as a 7-hour non-colored arthouse can look. In one sitting to digest this is unlikely to succeed, but in two quite. Fans of cinematic exotics are recommended.