Satantango

Saw Satantango, Bela Tarr's seven-and-a-half-hour long film. Yes, folks. I did it! I'm not sure that this feat, which requires me only to stay conscious and pointed inthe right direction, counts as an accomplishment, but it feels that way. This film is both very good and very slow.

It follows the dozen or so inhabitants of a small Hungarian village. We follow each in turn, their paths crossing, forking and joining. Several scenes are shown twice from different perspectives. The film is very dour and kind of pessimistic. It has a fairly wholesome theme of the ties that bind us together, but these ties are depicted as ugly, scrabbling. Spiders and spiderwebs are a recurrent image, poetically we leave for intermission while a trio of spiders are spinning webs. The connections of these villagers are via crime, adultery, shared guilt more than shared humanity. The film is comic at parts as well however and is described as a black comedy.

I saw it as a fairly straight tragedy but with richly observed scenes. The opening scene of cows plodding across the town square is often cited as a seductive, mesmerizing sequence but my favorite was the introduction of the village doctor. He sits by his window, obsessively noting down the movements of the villagers, pausing only to refill a flask of brandy and to reveal that he is deeply drunk. He's a fat, disgusting slob and I loved watching him wheeze and belch and stumble. Horrible and entrancing!

The film opens with a mysterious church-bell ringing. There is no church nearby so where are the bells coming from? The film suggests first that it is all of the echos of bells from neighboring villages, all ringing at the same time, joining together to make a distant bell noise just at this village. It then reveals that a retarded man is banging on an iron poll on the outskirts of town. This is a nice nucleus for the film. We are together, but only because of our shared ugliness. But we are together. But we are ugly. But we are together.

The characters often listen for quiet noises, try to identify subtle smells, peer into the darkness for an approaching figure. They are often hunting and looking for something. The only character to find this sense of connection and to find a pattern in all of this does so at the end of their life. Again, the film seems to both celebrate our quest for shared meaning and experience and also to mock the futility of this effort. If only the most primitive, animal things connect us, are those connections worth having?

The film's full of lingering shots. Everything is shown. When a man walks down a road, we watch him go until he's a dot on the horizon. A party breaks out and we follow it from reluctant start to passing-out finish. The effect is to make things feel very clinical, very expository. This is the whole of the village, I felt, even the boring parts. I'm not sure it justifies 450 minutes, but perhaps this is the price we must pay for this feeling.