Written and directed by Bela Tarr. Adapted from a novel, the movie if it can be called such ( it is so slow in places, it can hardly be called moving ) is more like a series of portraits. l came to this movie without knowing a single thing about it, l had no prior knowledge of it, l left it wanting those stolen seven and hours of my life back. This film will appeal to those interested in the technical side of film making, but the technical tricks do nothing to hide the lack of substance. l know in advance my views on this film will not be popular here, well popularity is not something l am seeking. Set sometime in the 1980's the movie has more the look and feel of the 1950's when Hungary was under Soviet control. Since there is little context given, l have to think this is a deliberate construct of the director, to remove the characters from any set time or place. The end result is that much of the film takes place in a featureless landscape, where the gray tones are unrelenting, just like much of the film, which l found tedious to the extreme. There are a few characters, but most of them are made out to be grotesque figures in hand me down clothes, whose only real past time is drinking copious amounts of alcohol, and falling over often. No one really works, there is no work to be done. It is as if they are all waiting for the Hungarian equivalent of Godot, but Beckett does not translate well it appears. The dialogue as such is sparse and contains few gems. One of the style devices used in the screenplay, is the repeating of certain lines, over and over. This is particularly annoying in one scene when that is all an old drunk does for about 10 minutes, over and over, while other characters are trying to speak. No one tells him to shut up, the characters keep on talking, even though he is just relentless. Many things about this film are also relentless. The rain being the most obvious. More than half the running time of the film is during the rain. Another relentless device, is the over use of tracking shots. Characters are shown walking great distances in the rain or the wind ( more on that later ) with the camera showing them walking the whole distance to where they are going. The most noticeable of these is perhaps the first shot of the movie, when cows are shown walking through a farmyard. The cows are quite loud and yet no people come to attend to them. After a while the cows get the idea that no one is coming, so they just wander off to wherever it is they were going in the first place and are never seen again. People are also shown in the same manner, walking everywhere, as there is not only a lack of people in the derelict towns depicted, but only a couple of motorized vehicles in the entire film. This lack of technology is one of the things that removes the film from any narrow context. The only thing that really can be used to date the film in any way is an electric type writer and that is not shown until almost at the end. A wind machine is also used, or in this case over used in a couple of scenes, to blow an absolute storm through the town as the camera follows certain characters down the deserted streets. A few times music is used on the soundtrack, but like much of the dialogue it is sparse, and the badly played tunes are repeated often, most notably on a Hohner piano accordion. At other times, some bells are used and they have an eerie, almost menacing effect. l say almost menacing as you would have to care about the effect of the bells first, but by the end of this film, l really could not have cared less. Yes the film has some neat stylistic devices, none better than when two clerks get together to rewrite an official report on the main characters, ( with some hilarious results ) where the camera circles twice around the desks of the two men, first in a clockwise motion, then it stops and does the same thing in reverse. Neat, but it does nothing to enhance our understanding or appreciation of the film itself, like so many of the other tricks used in the film, it becomes a self conscious aspect of the film that we notice more, because there is a lack of other things that would be of more benefit to the film itself, such as plot development, narrative, more decent characterization, or even a decent script. Perhaps this film was made to inspire us to seek out the original text. lf so it is an abject failure. There are no memorable characters, there is no one really deserving of any type of sympathy here or who commands audience interest. The whole film is a massive exercise in self indulgence. The end credits indicate that it took 3 years to make, that is about 2 years and nine months too long. So, what is so important or riveting that it takes over 7 and a half hours to depict ? The answer is nothing. Masterpiece ? Spare me.
Review of Satantango
