Satantango (1994)

Directed by Béla Tarr. Starring Mihaly Vig, Putyi Horvath, Laszlo Lugossy, and Eva Almassy Albert.

At roughly 7 ½ hours in duration, this film has for years been a kind of Holy Grail for card-carrying film buffs. But while the length is daunting, SATANTANGO is time wonderfully spent, rewarding an attentive audience’s patience in spades. Tarr employs extremely long takes, bravura tracking shots, and an understated use of overlapping time frames to tell the story of a few days in the life of a run-down Hungarian farming commune in waning years of Communist rule. The story is divided into twelve sections, the first six of which establish the commune and its people, and the final six employing these characters to craft a scathing yet sad postmortem for Communism in Eastern Europe. But to summarize the film’s plot does little credit to the greatness of SATANTANGO as a work of cinematic art. Without employing tricks most filmmakers use when striving for immediacy, Tarr places the audience firmly in the film’s reality, full of mud, rain and loneliness, but in a way that never wallows in despair. In fact, two of the film’s extended sequences are among the funniest pieces of filmmaking I’ve seen in a long while. SATANTANGO, for a film that is hyped almost like a cinematic dare for adventurous moviegoers, is surprisingly accessible and emotionally engaging, although the film’s effectiveness has almost nothing to do with conventional melodramatic devices and everything to do with the attention to detail that’s central to Tarr’s filmmaking style. When SATANTANGO was introduced to the audience I saw it with, it was described as “not so much a movie as a place you visit.” For me, that pretty well sums up what I love so much about it- it creates a world as distinctive as any in movie history, discovers the seemingly insignificant people who dwell within, and simply observes them over the course of a few pivotal days in their lives. SATANTANGO is a peerless cinematic experience, one every true lover of film should treat himself to at least once in his lifetime.

See also: Blog entry from Silly Hats Only