At Webster University
Feb. 17, 18 & 19 – 7:30 p.m.
My review:
Highly celebrated by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Susan Sontag, cinema’s current Homo Hungaricus, Béla Tarr is famous for the rarely screened films “Sátántangó” and “Werckmeister Harmonies.”
Jancsó’s long takes and Olmi’s details, here with echoes of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” and Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar” – that legacy is quite present, but the punch and grit that Tarr delivers is all his own. Yet for all those so-called “difficult films,” including this one, mention must be made of his longstanding companion in crime, the famous Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who knows his topic when he challenges all reviews with “You know, the problem is that anything that’s the least bit serious gets bad PR.”
This time again, in a tale that weaves a horse and the wind together as key characters, it is clear that there’s trouble. Is it Hungary, the earth, the land? Where to turn to? What causes insanity or Niezsche’s ten year silence? No answers… or at least nothing you can put in your pocket during the film or afterwards.
Survival must be madness…
2011 Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear Winner -> A-
