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Lars Rudolph,
Peter Fitz,
Hanna Schygulla,
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:
Béla Tarr
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: Facets
: Cult, Drama, Foreign
: 145 min.
: Hungarian
: English
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Bela Tarr follows up on his seven-hour epic Satantango, considered by some critics as one of the finest films of the 1990s, with this elegant, haunting work about the cycles of violence that have dogged Eastern European history. Jancos (Lars Rudolph) is a wide-eyed innocent who works as an occasional postal worker and as a caretaker for Mr. Ezster (Peter Fitz). An outsider and a visionary, he marvels at the miracles of creation, from the planets rotating in the heavens to the sundry animals on earth. One day, a circus featuring jars full of medical anomalies and a massive dead whale entombed in a corrugated metal trailer visits Jancos' economically depressed village. Another more sinister attraction is a shadowy figure dubbed "The Prince," whose nihilist rants incite the town's disaffected to riot. Not long afterwards, Mrs. Ezster (Hanna Schygulla) cajoles her estranged husband to join a citizen's action group against the circus, threatening to move back into his house if he doesn't play along. Tension in the town builds until, after one of The Prince's hate-filled speeches, throngs of angry men with blunt instruments ransack and brutalize a men's hospital ward. When the dust clears, lives are irrevocably changed. This film was screened at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Read our exclusive interview: Béla Tarr and "This Process of Making." In an interview here with Sean Axmaker, Gus Van Sant talked about how, watching the films of Béla Tarr, he could imagine "a parallel cinema" growing up alongside, say, D.W. Griffith's. That partly explains why, as Peter Hames has written in Kinoeye, Tarr is "set to mark the first genuine international breakthrough by a Hungarian auteur since Miklós Jancsó in the 60s." Now, Jay Kuehner talks with Tarr about Werckmeister Harmonies.
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| Tarring Bela
by talltale
April 10, 2006 - 7:13 AM PDT
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3 out of 4 members found this review helpful
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My first experience with the films of Bela Tarr, WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES, may be enough to make it my last. (I know, I know: you should always give a filmmaker a second chance. So I will. Sometime down the road.) I would guess that this Hungarian came of age, moviewise, during the 60s, as there is a definite "60s art film" sensibility at work: heavy symbolism; willful withholding of normal dialog; and long tracking shots, during which you can look and look and still not find all that much to see. In fact, you could look away from the screen for quite some time, perhaps get involved reading "War and Peace" (the condensed version, of course), come back the movie and not have missed much at all.
Initially, there is a hypnotic effect to the camera's movement, and the black and white cinematography is often rich and beautiful. But I found no ideas here--eastern Europe's proclivity to violence, the need of a populace to look for a Savior (and the concurrent willingness of the power-hungry to step up to the plate), how easily we can become an informer, child-rearing no-nos, the attraction of firearms and a new harmonic scale--that are handled in any truly profound or interesting manner. The initial scene is rather enchanting: the lead character, a hapless halfwit who doubles as our tour guide, arranges some of the denizens of a later night tavern into the short version of our solar system. From this beginning, you might expect something more. But no.
I realize that I am "dissing" a major light of modern cinema, and that I probably sound like some Rex Reed cretin-clone. So I'll try Tarr again. Who knows: I came late to Bresson, too. |
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GreenCine Member Rating
(Average 7.18)
34 Votes
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