Satantango

Goated Directors Cycle #48 Béla Tarr #4 This film is a monumental achievement in arthouse cinema. So much so to the point where I'm struggling to find the right words to review such a work. Seven and a half hours later, and I am a stronger man. I now feel like I can watch anything and everything because of how long this film was. It really makes one grateful for 90-minute films with non-glacial pacing. I watched the entire film in one go, with minimal breaks and limited food. For the sake of art, I will set aside my personal experience with the "allegedly ethical" filming of the cat scenes. When the little girl was throwing the cat around, hung it in the net, and forced its head down into the milk, there was so much physicality and force involved that makes it impossible for me to believe that it was filmed ethically, It borders on animal abuse. I want to make it clear that I am not excusing said animal abuse, but taking it in consideration with what the film is trying to do. I strongly disagree with the utilization of a real cat for these scenes. For me, the cat scenes were excruciating to the point of tears. I honestly don't really know what to say about this film because there's just so much here. The narrative here is so expansive, yet so contained. Béla Tarr, through his exhaustive and draining filmmaking, stretches a simple story into an increasingly agonizing and depressive epic of immense proportion. In the beginning of the film, we see an approximately eight minute tracking shot of cows exiting the closed-down factory, wandering aimlessly in a broken world with no sense of hope or wonder. This both sets up the way the film will work, with its long, uninterrupted takes and shots & glacial pacing, and the depressing nature of it. In a way, the cattle could be seen as a metaphor for humanity, but especially the inhabitants of the run-down village. In the morning, Futaki awakes to the sound of bells in a tower that doesn't exist, calling him out of bed and into the world. Perhaps these bells symbolize a false sense of hope that is kept in the mind of humans when we endure such suffering. These bells keep Futaki going, but they aren't actually there, paralleling the fact that it is indeed a false hope. All of the villagers maintain hope that their compensation for the closing of the factory is coming soon, but it never actually comes, exactly like the bells. The way the narrative unfolds is extremely unique. We see events through one perspective, and there are certain people that are present whom we don't know anything about, and then later, we get the full context for why that person was there and what led them to do what they did. Just like the title suggests, the film moves in the manner of a tango, constantly moving both forwards and backwards, slowly weaving a web of increasing complexity, depth, and breadth. As the film progresses, we further understand each character, their interactions with the world around them, and their experiences from unique perspectives which reveal so much more about their existences and motivations. One of the key idea of this film is the cyclical nature of humanity, and how we always return to and cause the pain that which we wish to escape. The young girl takes out her trauma on her cat, only thing weaker than her, continuing a cycle of abuse that ends in their mutual destruction. She was only able to find solace in the annihilation of what she alone can control: anything weaker than her, and herself. Her killing of the cat and her own suicide highlight the trauma she endured and her inability to cope with it, as well as the failures of society in their mistreatment of her. Despite the fact that the town is struggling after the fall of communism, they ultimately gain false hope from a potential commune, which is what originally caused their town's failure. At the end of the film, we hear the beautiful yet haunting song of the non-existent bells once again, closing the circle as the Doctor observes the empty town, and realizes that what Futaki heard in that morning was in fact not a true bell, but a crazed man banging the metal in the chapel announcing "The Turks are coming!", with no rest. I feel that the persistence of the crazed man in the chapel could represent the ultimate continuation of human tradition, even through tragedy and destruction. The continuation of tradition is in and of itself cyclical in nature within this film, as the song of the bells are the bookends on each side of the film. Through this realization, the doctor shrouds himself in darkness, the film ends, and the circle closes. There are so many more things I could talk about with this film that it's impossible to capture in a decent-length review, so I will leave it at this.