Life cannot be edited

terraplane

Some words commonly used in reviews of this movie: "It has no plot" "Nothing happens" "It's very long" "It's too long" "Beautiful" "Brilliant" "Masterpiece" "Boring" etc, etc...

Every word you read about this movie is true. Including the ones that criticize it.

It's not a matter of opinion so much as a matter of fact.

Every opinion about this movie is acceptable, there is no right or wrong. Which is something that cannot be said about most other movies.

The story of Satantango can be interpreted in many ways, you can make up your own mind.

Is it ostensibly about the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, when people in unprofitable collective farms found themselves left without a future, when the milk of human kindness stopped flowing from the abundant teat of the Communist State, when empty ideology finally gave way to grim reality? Possibly. The metaphors abound if you want to look for them.

Or maybe it's just a boring story of some boring people in a muddy village who get conned by a bloke they thought was dead, filmed by someone who didn't know when to shout "Cut!"

Why should you watch this very long black and white movie, where nothing much appears to be happening, about a group of forlorn and hopeless people living in a broken down village in the middle of nowhere, where it's either windy or raining all the time, waiting for a mysterious and slightly sinister con man to take their money in the hope of a better life?

Well, it really depends on you.

Few movies can match Satantango for beautiful photography and majestic cinematography. The camera either moves in glorious long tracking shots; slow, circling crane shots and long steadi-cam walking shots or it records long takes from a fixed tripod as the action, or sometimes lack of it, takes place. The few movies that can match it are mostly made by Bela Tarr.

Those that say nothing happens are watching from the narrow brief of what happens in other movies, which is that they exist to entertain. Satantango is not one of these.

Just as in Tarkovsky's movies, to which Bela Tarr's movies are closely related, time is just as an important dimension as space. Real time, as opposed to edited time fragments chopped together to present a story in non-linear real time representation. In other words, a movie edited to present a complete story in 90 minutes. A beginning, a middle and an end. Satantango is not a complete story. What it portrays begins before we start watching and continues after the cameras stop recording it. We are merely observing the minutiae of everything that happens, just as in real life we observe every moment of our life passing, it cannot be edited.

Maybe that's the key to Satantango.

Life cannot be edited.

Or maybe I'm just another pretentious reviewer who loves beautiful black and white movies like this one.

You decide.

score 10/10

terraplane 28 February 2011

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2392140/