Satantango

Dir. Bela Tarr

Hungary 439 Minutes

1994

Starring: Mihaly Vig, Putyi Horvath, Laszlo feLugossy, Eva Almassy Albert, Janos Derzsi

*****/*****

Eager to see this film for years, the new 4K restoration at the New York Film Festival was the perfect way to scratch that itch. Satantango is a massive work, so epic in length and accomplishment while simultaneously intimate in its subject. The narrative sets up camp in a small, rain soaked village ominously cut off from the rest of the world because of heavy floods and mud. While some of the villagers plot to make off with some of the towns money, a lonely and drunken doctor watches all the goings-on from the vantage point of his window, making notes of everyone in various books. In each of its twelve episodes, the film moves forwards and backwards in time, often recontextualizing and reconfiguring the characters within its space. In one episode, a little girl runs up to the doctor, our focus character for that particularly sequence, and in the next the story of the little girl is detailed, etc. The film ends up feeling a bit more linear in the second half, with the crux of the narrative devoted to the arrival of Irimiás, a charismatic and manipulative former co-worker who everyone in the town took for dead. Irimiás comes with plans of his own, harboring a secret that he is an informant for the police outside of the village. 

Released in 1994 and shot between 1991 and 1994, Satantango instantly feels like a relic of something much older. Moments feel like one should not quite be witnessing them, and others are almost like you do not want to witness them anyway (more squirming done at the promise of violence to a cat than anything graphic in recent memory). The general aesthetic, vibe, and slowness are similar to the things that lead to personal attraction to Dreyer, though without his ultimate hope or spiritualism. Tarr's characters all resemble the walking dead, with many shambling down the long, barren, and wet roads on their way to their next drink. We move in lumbering rhythm as they live, ambient sounds accompanying dialogue like the ticking of a clock in a tavern relentlessly marking time as the characters inch one second closer to. . . what, exactly? Death? The feared arrival of their former inhabitant? The film is staggering to look it, with sequences feeling akin to some kind of religious experience. But if there is a God in this piece, it is the feared Irimiás who seems to be able to get whatever he wishes and bend even the most steadfast to his will, lacking any empathy or connection with the town he once called his home. And as the film lumbers through its entrancing seven plus hour running time, with single shots holding for minutes upon minutes until Tarr is ready to say they are finished, rather than the release of a conclusion the circle simply closes and we end where we began: in darkness with the haunting and never-ending sound of bells permeating the black. ​September 29th, 2019