It’s hard to imagine a review of Bela Tarr’s 1994 picture Satantango that doesn’t at least note the film’s epic length. At seven and a half hours, I believe it’s the second longest film to be viewed in the 1001 canon, falling short of only Claude Lanzmann’s Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985). While its length certainly makes the film one of the biggest challenges facing any contender for supremacy over the list, I believe that it is not a wholly unjustified runtime. Within the context of this runtime, much has been made of this film’s average shot length. At over 145 seconds, Tarr takes his time with each one, likely employing less of them here than most filmmakers would in a more standard two-hour delivery. But watching Satantango, even as your mind calculates how much left of it you’ve still to view, it becomes clear how much thought Tarr has put into time.
“Humans are to time as twigs are to rain,” one character laments. “Defenseless” That Tarr chose these words is clearly not an accident, as rain falls almost relentlessly throughout this picture. An opening voiceover tells us that the autumn rains have begun, and that they will not cease until the first frost, when they will turn to snow. There will not be another dry day until the following spring. Such is life in a remote Hungarian agricultural collective. Though no specific year is given for the setting of this story, several hints suggest that it takes place nearer the fall of Eastern block communism than to the “glory days” of the space race. It’s abundantly clear that the collective has seen better days as well. Cinematographer Gabor Medvigy’s stark almost haunting black and white opens on the main quad of the compound, where the cows seem now to have free reign. Pigs are as likely to be found in the streets as human inhabitants, and the nearby town square is occasionally overrun by horses. As we see the townsfolk and learn more about them from sparse voiceover narration, it is clear that they are waiting to leave, waiting for a large sum of money to arrive. After this final payday (wages for the previous years work) almost everyone who remains will be gone, leaving the town to the livestock.
One person who appears to be staying is the doctor. Aging and fat, he’s content for now to sit at his window and spy on his fellow citizens, perhaps for the authorities. But whom will he watch when they are gone? The woman who brings his food is so ashamed to admit that she’s leaving him that she makes up a story about how difficult it is to get to his house after the rains begin. There also appears to be someone who is returning, a man who was supposed to be dead. When word reaches the town that he was seen on the road, everyone fears that there payday might be in jeopardy. It may be anyway, as several farmers have ideas about what they might do were they to abscond with everyone’s earnings.
These are the events of the day. People scheme amongst themselves. Men cheat with each other’s wives, or visit prostitutes just to pass the time. The doctor gets drunk, only to stumble out into the rain in hopes of finding more to drink. Gossip fills the pub more so than patrons. In a scene I was glad to learn was faked, a young girl tortures her cat because there is nothing else to do. Most of all, these people play a waiting game and we wait with them. The girl’s older brother steals her pocket change. She poisons the cat, and then takes some herself when the guilt becomes too much. She’s mourned, but the wait continues, and when the supposedly dead man arrives he has much to say about this, without really saying anything at all.
Sometimes, Satantango feels like a staring contest between Tarr and his audience, as if he is daring them to continue watching. Blink and you might miss what this all means. He is often brutal to his viewers, subjecting them to lengthy ordeals such as the cat torture, or the horrendous music of the pub, or a drunk telling the same already repetitive story over and over and over. Near the film’s conclusion, the doctor seeks out the source of a loud ringing, finding a man in the dilapidated chapel banging a knell and relentlessly yelling “the Turks are coming.”
Scenes of silence can be equally frustrating, as long takes of people eating, or the townspeople arranged in a “Last Supper” motif engender that same staring contest feeling. As the rain continues to fall through all of this, the flies and the spiders of the village all seek refuge indoors with its human inhabitants. That the actor’s agreed to endure the rain alone is amazing, particularly when considering that the film was in production for nearly four years.
I can’t tell you what Satantango is supposed to be. It’s been read as a commentary on communism, and on capitalism for that matter, but I think that Tarr is less concerned with politics than he is with human nature as a whole. I believe he intended for this film to truly convey what it feels like to wait for change. But I’m not sure what his feelings on change are either. Some hint though might be found in the title and the structure of the narrative. The story is circular like the tango: six steps forward and six steps back. Likewise, it is told in twelve sections that end right where they began.
Language: Hungarian
Runtime: 450 Minutes
Available through Netflix.com
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