The greatest and most thought-provoking film in decades

AukeBriek

This is a 7 hour long film, whose long takes slowly start to creep under your skin and ultimately leaves you enchanted. In an almost abandoned village, the remaining villagers plot and scheme to get away with the money, but are all conned out of it by the false prophet Irimias. The story might appear to be about the end of communism or the exploitations of capitalism, but this is not the case. At the heart of this story lies the plight of a traumatized child (Estike) and an old recluse (Doctor). They are the true victims of a monstrous scheme which deprived them not of their money, but of their hope for a full, rich and human life and ultimately of their lives as such. What they were confronted with was a picture of a society in which cold, heartless human beings destroyed their own lives and those of others through their low-life plodding, drinking, fornicating - in short - through their unrelenting, drunken dance of Satan. It was this picture that killed them.

What is perhaps most striking is the relation between this film and Tarkvosky's work. I think that, although this remains highly speculative, Tarr has taken up Tarkovsky's work as the thesis of a Hegelian dialectical triad. The thesis is the subjective, poetic and intimate splendor of a girl, Estike, sitting perfectly still with a purring a cat on her lap, a scene which lasts for minutes! So far Tarr's images are the offspring of Tarkovsky's work, although Tarr's long takes seem to capture the core of someone's existence with concrete textures in an almost sculpture-like way, whereas Tarkovsky's images seem to revolve entirely around their poetic nature. The antithesis however is the introduction of an ethical dimension: we learn that Estike is not only a deep girl who has an openness towards the sublime, but is actually a traumatized child with very very deep psychological problems, because we actually see her torturing and killing her cat and finally killing herself. Thus the poetic image is suddenly interrupted by an objective antithesis, although this ethical moment is also revealed as something which was always already present in the existential renderings of the film's characters: this is perhaps Tarr's critique of Tarkovsky! This ethical moment ultimately solidifies itself as a social and political moment, in that society's nihilism is identified as the cause of Estike's tragedy. However, the ethical, the social and the political are ultimately dismissed as one-sided, because the conduct of Irimias and the total abandonment of Doctor shows us that the ethical fate of society and the individual human being, cannot ultimately be determined by political means alone, but also demands a more radical transformation of man, perhaps an openness towards the sublime, which yields a synthesis between, the poetical, the intimate and the sublime with the ethical the social and the political. What is thoroughly un-Hegelian however, is the way in which Tarr ultimately sketches a very bleak picture of society, in which this synthesis is far from realized, and gives us nothing in the way of assurances that it is in fact realizable: on the contrary, it shows us only the dance of Satan.

score 10/10

AukeBriek 25 March 2012

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2586373/