BFI Top 50: Sátántangó, Released in 1994, Directed by BélaTarr

 Special note: I will be watching the film through Netflix. I can only have one disc out at a time, so I will be watching the film over several days. I will write up initial reactions for each disc I finish, do an overview once I finish the whole film, and then write about it again once I have read some other opinions.

 

What I know Going In

That the film is over 6 hours long and is about a Hungarian farming collective.

 

Initial Reaction

First Disc (This includes the first three parts of the movie)

 

Sátántangó seems like a film that doesn’t actually exist in our world. It would feel out of place even during the 60’s. It seems almost perverse that it somehow got made during the 90’s, a decade defined by emergence of independent films that were made cheaply and quickly. For example, this was year that Pulp Fiction exploded onto the scene, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and made its director, Quentin Tarantino, into a rock star. Compared to Pulp Fiction, Sátántangó looks like it was made on an alien planet, or at least a post-apocalyptic version of our own. Aside from a few modern appliances, the film could almost take place in a pre-industrial revolution era.

 

It seems pointless to recount the plot of the movie, but here is what I have gathered so far. The movie takes place on an extremely rural farming collective in communist Hungary. Two people are attempting to leave the farm with money that everyone has earned. A third person overhears their conversation and insinuates himself into their group in order to leave as well. Two rabble-rousers are returning to the farm after being away, possibly in prison, for two years. Finally, a frail, old doctor patiently observes everyone else and attempts to walk to an out of the way barn to get more brandy.

 

That’s the entire plot that occurs in the first two hours. The rest of that time is taken up by very slow camera movement and long takes. The camera frequently lingers on shots of the landscape (perhaps wasteland would be a better term?), animals, and different barriers such as windows and doors. The film is also content to quietly watch its characters walk or sit in complete silence (much like the doctor watches the other people). The film seems only slightly concerned with what is going one with its human characters. It seems equally interested in their surroundings and grubby animals that scrounge around it. The film seems to be suggesting that humans aren’t really that important and are either overpowered by, or equal to their surroundings.

 

Surprisingly, the film kept me engaged for its first two hours. The films slow nature, grim settings, well-worn characters, and low key black and white cinematography combined to form a haunting experience. It reminds me of the few silent films I have seen. In fact, with a little tweaking, I almost think Sátántangó could be a silent film. It has the old, ghostly quality that many early films have acquired over the years.

 

2^nd Disc (Includes parts 4 through 6)

Well, I was very pleased with myself for staying engaged with the film during the entirety of the first disc. However, I snapped about halfway through the second disc. I actually started laughing during the dance scene in the pub when I realized how long that scene would keep repeating itself. I reached a point where all of the little stylistic touches Tarr employed that had intrigued me at first blushed, actively annoyed me here. The long stretches of little to no dialogue, the seemingly mis-framed shots that have no people or focal point in them, and the vague way everyone talks to each other really grated on me. I think I know what the “point” of it all is, to show a place in all of its tiny details, the way people walk, the ambient sounds present when no one is talking, the small motions people go through in their daily lives, the way the foliage rustles in the wind, and the sound of the rain. If all of the aforementioned themes are what the movie is building to, then it is well on its way to accomplishing them. This may be another Jeanne Dielman case where the film’s goal, and its method of reaching that goal, is inherently uninteresting to me.

 

This portion of the film has two main parts, a gathering of the villager in a local pub to discuss recent events, drink, and eventually dance, and following the day of young girl. The young girl sequence contains the most shocking (an odd word to use in relation to this film) moment. The girl violently wrestles with a cat, ties it up to hang from the ceiling, kills it with a solution of milk and rat-poison, and walks around with it in a confused state. I actually began screaming at my TV, because the girl’s torture of the cat is definitely real. I actually don’t know if the girl fully knew what would happen to the cat when she gave it the rat poison. I also don’t know why she killed herself. We see a few glimpses of her mother, who is obviously a drunk, at the pub and, like every other character in the film, her existence is rather miserable. Perhaps the girl saw suicide as the realistic way to leave the village.

 

3^rd Disc (Includes parts 7 through 12)

Fuck this movie.

 

Further Thoughts

Satantango is a mesmerizing, haunting film. Its images have a ghostly beauty that reminds me of looking at photos of abandoned amusement parks or Chernobyl. As its long tracking shots and striking black and white (sometimes gray) compositions show, it is also an immense technical achievement. In its first shot, it is effective in establishing its theme of humanity as a lost, directionless mass that will remain so no matter what system they are governed by. It forces viewers into the stark reality of living at the end of the world. It is one of the few films I have seen that seems inimitable.

Unfortunately, all of those descriptions apply only to the first two hours. After that point, Satantango becomes a disengaging, uninteresting slog. The experience of watching it feels like trudging along a muddy trail against the wind and rain, much like the characters in the film. Every aspect that makes the film work in the first few hours (the long shots, the silence, the repetition of certain scenes), becomes absolutely maddening soon after that. I actually started laughing at several points just to break up the tedium of watching the film. This is a huge understatement, but I really do think the film is too long. Its aesthetic and basic themes are explored well enough within the first 2 hours, that the next 5 seem somewhat unnecessary.

 

I should say that I really do want to like this and see it for the masterpiece that others claim it to be. But it just didn’t grab me like it has with so many others. I’m not against slow films at all, but I did need some emotion or spark to latch onto, and Satantango eventually lost that for me. Every review I have read says that the only way to see the film is to catch on the big screen in one sitting. That may be true, but the way critics have stated it reeks of snobbery. That experience is impossible for anyone who doesn’t live in LA or New York, so I will most likely never be able to the film that way.

 

Why is it on the list?

Satantango is a monument of cinema that still stands defiantly out of time of any cinematic trends. Even though, I didn’t stay engaged with the whole experience, I would still agree with the film’s placement based solely on its first two hours.