Review: Satantango (1994)

Cast: Mihály Vig, Putyi Horváth, László feLugossy
Director: Béla Tarr
Country: Hungary | Germany | Switzerland
Genre: Comedy | Drama | Mystery
Official Clip: Here

Ominous church bells toll in the distance, calling out like ghosts from some long-forgotten past. A seemingly endless rainfall feeds the muddy wasteland that is the village square. A herd of cows waders about, as aimlessly lost as the community who owns them. The indomitable sense of oppression hangs over the scene, as thick and suffocating as the omnipresent fog which hangs in the air. This is Sátántangó, the 432 minute opus of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr, famed for his unyieldingly slow pacing, intricately choreographed long takes, and overwhelming incarnations of cosmic uncertainty and existential nihilism.

The indomitable sense of oppression hangs over the scene, as thick and suffocating as the omnipresent fog which hangs in the air.

I was but a young teenager awake far later than was wise when a chance switching of television network saw the screen alight with a monochrome scene of inebriated dancing. Around a young man narrating the inherent doom and beauty of a lunar eclipse, a procession of drunken Hungarian men swirled around, enacting his every word with a comic absurdity rendered strangely profound by the lugubrious orchestrations of an oddly affecting score. The camera danced in tandem with the men, its swooping movements through every inch of the room a mysterious and utterly hypnotic procession the like of which I, by no means a fan of film then, had ever seen. Here was the opening scene of Werckmeister Harmonies, Tarr’s acclaimed 2000 masterpiece, the film that drew me in and returned me, 145 majestic and enigmatic minutes later, a soul unexpectedly introduced to the astounding beauty that is cinema at its best. I hold it still to be the greatest film I have ever seen; I suspect, the awesome wonder of that first experience forever immortalising it in my memory, that nothing will ever surpass it.

As doom-laden bells toll over a black screen, a narrator informs us that the closest church is some miles away, its bell tower years ago fallen to the ravages of time and this wind-swept plain. A man, Futaki, arises from bed and limps to the window of the cold stone house, looking out with alarm over the muddied desolation of the communal farm in which he owns a stake. Behind him in the bed lies Mrs Schmidt, with whom he has been having an affair. He tells her he will take his share of the profits from the community’s sale of their livestock and land and buy some property himself; they plan to elope there together. They are just two of Sátántangó’s many characters, the small community providing a wealth of personalities: from an elderly alcoholic doctor, to a disillusioned young girl, to a charismatic man who tries to convince the community to reinvest their money in a similar endeavour, the narrative follows multiple intersecting stories across its seven hour running time.

Like co-writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s source novel, Sátántangó structures itself like the titular dance, a procession of twelve distinct movements (an opening eight minute tracking shot following the cowherd through the village serves as an establishing prologue). Each of the movements follows the perspective of a different character; often a later movement will revisit a scene from an earlier one, but shown from a different angle that adds to our understanding of the complete picture. Tarr has commented that the entire film comprises just 150 shots in total, most of these lasting as long as ten minutes. It is his extraordinary cinematographic choreography that is immediately striking about his style, the way the camera effortlessly weaves between characters, circles conversations, and tracks behind individuals as they trudge around the village through the mud drawing the audience into a trancelike state of fascinated wonder. One cannot help but be mesmerised by Tarr’s aesthetic, the swooping movements and grandiose steps of his complex camerawork a breath-taking display of cinematic virtuosity.

…the camera effortlessly weaves between characters, circles conversations, and tracks behind individuals as they trudge around the village through the mud drawing the audience into a trancelike state of fascinated wonder.

It is not solely in Tarr’s mastery of his craft that we find ourselves consumed with the sheer beauty of everything onscreen, however. Along with his pairing with Krasznahorkai, with whom he has worked on every film since, 1988’s Damnation saw Tarr team up with the composer Mihály Vig, whose haunting scores play no small part in creating the enveloping atmosphere of the world of each of Tarr’s films since. Several accordion pieces comprise his contribution to Sátántangó, many of them performed by the cast members in the communal bar in which they gather by night to drink away the woes of the day. One of the great trademarks of Tarr’s films since the invention of his current distinctive style is scenes of drunken dancing interspersed amidst the heavy portrayals of life’s bleakness. These comic interludes bring much-needed light to the darkness of the portraits he paints. Sátántangó features one of the best such scenes of any of these films, one of the characters wandering among his fellow drunkards balancing a cheese roll on his forehead in a show of such baffling ridiculousness one can’t helped but be reduced to tears of fitful laughter. Yet like so much of the film, the scene is rendered far more complex when we remember an earlier scene that showed us a young, lonely girl staring in from outside. Lost and forgotten amidst the adults’ concerns over finances, her devastatingly sad face looks in from the coldness and darkness of the harsh world outside, all alone and outside the wider community.

Not only is the story of this young girl immensely trying emotionally, it is one of the most striking manifestations of the film’s political philosophy. Sátántangó is a film which clearly addresses the issues of Communism and the destruction it led to of Hungary in terms physical, financial, and cultural. The idea of the communal farm draws immediate parallels to Hungary under Communist rule; similarly, the idea of a living on the fringes of a bigger farm with more potential but ultimately just as empty is a clear reflection of the neighbouring Soviet Union. Characters speak in terms of Eastern and Western horizons; the howling winds and omnipresent rain seem to reinforce the sense of entrapment the country faced stuck between two opposing powers. But this is no basic allegory for Communism at work. Tarr builds his characters to the point where we understand their minds, and come to accept why it is they were drawn toward this life that so clearly ruined them.

Though Sátántangó never becomes boring or repetitive across its seven hours, to say the time passes by unnoticed would be both untrue and a fundamental misunderstanding of Tarr’s aim. He wants us to feel every second of this experience; indeed, a great many scenes feature in the background the loud ticking of an unseen clock. We are supposed to feel every second go by; part of his intention is to make us appreciate the slow dullness of these people’s lives. More than being just an intelligently constructed allegory for the way in which Communism overtook Hungary and left it a deeply wounded land, Sátántangó is also a film of existential insight: a look at the circular banality of life. At its heart, this is a humanist work that looks beyond the politics to the lives within it, and the dreary repetition that is human existence. This is far more than Tarr’s rendition of Hungarian history; this is a sublime examination of humankind, and everything that comes with our being on this earth. Each of the characters deals with the increasingly miniscule prospects of their lives in different ways: from the haunting way the little girl speaks to her cat, to the never-ending drinking of the doctor, to the sexual escapades of Futaki.

It’s a chilling message delivered through the cipher of a complex political allegory, an epic moral conducted over a vast hypnotic journey through some of cinema’s most dark and haunting images…

Sátántangó’s most famous aspect—its length—plays a vital part in its effect. There inevitably comes a point in the film where the simple exertion of such a marathon viewing takes its toll, and it is at this point the film’s true brilliance reveals itself. One of the aforementioned extended dance scenes constituted this point for me; indeed, its positioning at this particular interval of the narrative, preceded by what is certainly the most difficult of the film’s segments, appears tailored to produce exactly this reaction. First we laugh at the mania of what is unfolding before us, then laughter turns to something altogether different: despair, almost. Sátántangó wears down the viewer gradually, eventually reducing its audience to exasperated defeat. The heaviness of these lives seeps off the screen and connects with us on a level of emotion so powerful it is overwhelming, and uncomfortably so. We finally get how these people feel, crushed between the bleak reality of human existence and the dead-end future ensured by an oppressive reign. Long though the film is, our glimpse into this life is infinitesimal when considered alongside their unending days, months, and years of it. This wild dance we have spent the last seven hours in the grip of, this “Satan’s tango”, is life itself. We are all locked in a lasting embrace with the evil of mundanity and the cold reality of our own existence: six steps forward; six steps back; always circling but never progressing. It’s a chilling message delivered through the cipher of a complex political allegory, an epic moral conducted over a vast hypnotic journey through some of cinema’s most dark and haunting images, but one of the most brutally frank and beautifully bleak works the medium has ever produced.

Sátántangó is one of the most effectively empathetic experiences in the history of cinema, using its formidable length to give us just a small taste of the mundanity of these characters’ lives. Tarr puts a new perspective on the idea of the circle of life, looking at the crushingly bleak thing existence can be. Functioning on the level of great political parable, awe-inspiringly innovative cinematographic art, engrossing study of humankind, and—in its final chapter—magnificently self-reflexive examination of its own being and functionality, this is one of the most incredible things you will ever see. Where Werckmeister Harmonies gave birth to my unending adoration of cinema and its vast potential, Sátántangó magnified it many times over, renewing my appreciation of the incredible things the medium is capable of, and solidifying Tarr as among the greatest artists that will ever employ it.