If I seem a little groggier than usual today—my skin perhaps a little paler, my eyes perhaps a little more bloodshot, my overall demeanour perhaps a little gloomier—I have an excellent explanation. Last week, I passed one of the ultimate film-critic rites of passage. I gave up most of my weekend to spend hour upon hour in the company of a dozen or so greasy-haired, middle-aged, alcoholic Hungarians and wandering the perpetually muddy streets of their depressing rural village.
That’s right, ladies and gentlemen: I have watched Sátántangó.
Mention the title Sátántangó to a casual movie-watcher and you won’t get much response (except maybe “Wow, that word sure does contain a lot of accents”), but among the festival-going, cinématheque-attending elite of the film world, it’s widely regarded as one of the great directorial achievements of the last 25 years. And the fact that it has been nearly impossible to see in Canada or the U.S. outside of a handful of special museum screenings has only added to its allure. So has the austere stylistic rigour of director Béla Tarr, who constructs the film from a series of unusually long, impeccably choreographed single takes, his camera always on the prowl, exploring his dingy sets with one slow, patient lateral pan or track-in after another.
Also, the film was shot in black and white. And it’s in Hungarian. And it’s seven hours long. Seven and a half, including intermissions.
Now, it’s not every moviegoer who willingly sits down to watch a seven-hour black-and-white Hungarian film—much less one that often seems hell-bent on trying your patience, pushing to see just how close to total stasis a film can get and still be called a “motion picture.” I have to admit, my eagerness to see Sátántangó was probably motivated as much by dumb, masochistic pride as by my interest in the film’s actual content. The moment after I’d absorbed the concluding image of Hour Seven—an extended shot of a fat, aging doctor laboriously boarding up the window of his study—I couldn’t wait for the people at work to ask me how I’d spent my weekend. “I watched a seven-hour Hungarian movie!” I’d cry out. “Top that!”
But my pride was undercut by the knowledge that I’d cheated a little. I hadn’t watched Sátántangó in one mammoth dose of concentrated bleakness, like you’re supposed to; I’d actually split the experience up into three bite-sized sessions over Friday, Saturday and Sunday, like a little kid divvying up the last Brussels sprout on his dinner plate. It felt more like watching three films instead of just one. And so, while two of the movies I watched were a little on the tedious side (albeit intentionally so), the second is one of the most amazing movies I’ve ever seen in my life.
That’s the segment that contains Sátántangó’s three greatest sequences. In one, Tarr’s camera follows the town doctor on an errand to the tavern to refill the gigantic flask of booze he keeps beside the chair he occupies all day long, spying on his neighbours. (His obesity turns this simple task into a quest as daunting as Frodo Baggins’s trek to Mount Doom.) In another, we watch a little girl play in a barn with her pet cat. The mood doesn’t stay playful for long, though—eventually she feeds the animal rat poison and then carries its corpse through the rain to a secluded glade, where she commits suicide by eating some of the same poison herself.
And in the third scene, Tarr shows us a group of about eight or nine villagers in the local pub. One of them is playing a catchy but maddeningly repetitive riff on the accordion, a couple more hit their tables with canes to keep time and two couples dance a clumsy shuffle on the floor while one guy stumbles around shoving everyone and every now and then another guy walks across the room with a stick of bread balanced on his forehead.
This scene goes on for... well, at least 15 minutes—far, far past the point where you’d think any sane director would end it. Way farther. Like, three times as far. It ought to be unendurable (especially since we’ve already watched this scene from the perspective of the little girl, who’s paused to look through the tavern window on her way to killing herself), and yet it’s absolutely hypnotic. And funny and moving and, in a wordless, instinctive way, kind of profound.
I’ve described this scene to my friends, but to my chagrin, I always give up trying to explain why it affects me so deeply and end up just making a joke out of it: “And it just goes on like that... for 15 minutes! It’s awesome!”
But Sátántangó *is* awesome. And if it were any shorter, it would be less awesome. No joke. Next stop: Berlin Alexanderplatz!
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