Not just a Movie, but...An Experience.

amolghadi

"Cowardice, sinful Impotence" -- Irimiás, an outsider.

As the movie opens, a Herd of Cattle is seen wandering aimlessly in the Village. These animals differ not much from the Villagers they symbolize and share the rural air with. The humans here, are living (or rather dying) a life of Hopelessness, Aimlessness and Despair with nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.

As if to augment villagers' own Woes, there's Mother Nature, hell-bent on grinding, beating the Villagers down with a Catastrophe of it's own: Heavy Torrential Rains that do succeed in hiding the tears of the Villagers, but also succeed in destroying everything that the Villagers have a scarce sense of ownership of, ...including the thin Coats on their stagnant bodies, which perhaps are their Last Resort of Protection.

To stave off a certain Madness looming over them and thus to ascertain Psychological Survival, each villager has an elusive escape-route of his/her own: extra-marital affairs, brandy, note-taking, holy books...anything goes by. It's a tragic affair, because not even small children are exempted from this shadow of Pessimism and their Neurotic Behavior is always simmering on the surface.

The degree of Despair in the Villagers can be gauged from the fact that they trigger into some kind of blurry action only after a particular Tragedy strikes them and that's because each villager is a Reactive individual, not willing to find solutions himself/herself, but waiting passively and infinitely for some external miracle to show them the way.

Each villager has a Personal Story of his own...and a varying Degree of Madness. The Doctor is mad, the Repent inside him not being sufficient enough to offset his Addictions. Kelemen is crazier than the Doctor. But Kelemen, still, may not be as mad as the Madman who tolls the bells of the dilapidated church the whole day, but he is surely on his way there.

Thankfully, Irimiás who arrives from outside the village as per the orders of the Law to help the Villagers, is looking for a Redemption from a personal past of his own.

If not for the above quoted stinging words that Irimiás describes the villagers with, until their hearts burn, probably they might still have been lying around snoring, exactly like the Doctor believes them to be. But Irimiás has a plan...not a definite one...but nevertheless he has something that he has brought with himself that the villagers don't have: A Sense of Authority, Leadership Qualities ...and a Glimmer of Hope.

Can he save the Villagers from their own Pessimism? ...Or will the Heavy Rains succeed in grinding the Villagers down?

---- Sátántangó (1994), a Hungarian Drama from the acclaimed director, Bela Tarr.

In a way, this movie is strangely ironic in that, we realize that the level of Despair in the atmosphere is at its deepest...but we also know that it cannot get deeper than this and now the only way out, is the way of Rising high up.

The background scores by Mihály Víg, play a very important character in themselves and provide a distinct personality to each scene.

The technique that makes this movie unique, is that we are witnessing the same Segment of Time from different Point of Views of various characters involved. Each View, arrives at a common point of a specific Revelation that has an immediate impact and then moves onward to that specific character's Individual Arc that again climaxes with a concrete Event.

score 10/10

amolghadi 13 August 2017

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3780013/