the spiders’
webs
by Douglas Messerli
Béla Tarr and László Krasznahorkai (screenplay,
based on the fiction by Krasnzhorkai), Béla Tarr (director) Sátántangó / 1994
Many film critics have written about
the endurance it takes to see Béla Tarr’s 7 1/2 hour cinematic masterwork, Sátántangó (Satan’s Tango), so I
undertook my attendance at the Los Angeles County Museum’s premier of this
work—which requires sitting through two hours with a ten minute break, sitting
through another 2 ½ hours followed by a dinner of one hour, before undergoing
the final segment of about three hours in length—with some trepidation. Would
my bladder hold out? Might I fall asleep staying up so late beyond my usual
early bedtime?
The first long take of the film, in
which for over 10 minutes we watch the muddy yards of a farming cooperative as
a herd of cows slowly meander from the barn to their outdoor positions, defines
the near-maddeningly indolent rhythm of everyday life of the community of
failed individuals this film depicts. Yet from this first scene on one quickly
becomes astonished as the bleak emptiness of the landscape is transformed,
through the slow and intent revelation of Tarr’s camera, into a world of
startling beauty. A narrative voice describes the wondrous sound (and sound is
particularly crucial to the experience of Sátátangó)
of church bells which awaken Futaki, a man having just arisen from the bed of
his neighbor’s wife. But where are the bells coming from, the narrator asks,
when the nearest church was bombed out in World War II, and all other churches
are too far away to be heard in this small village?
The woman’s husband, Schmidt, has planned to abscond with the profits
the cooperative have made from the year’s crops, but Futaki, who sneaks out the
back door and reenters through the front, is on to him, and demands he
immediately receive his share. Soon after they are told by a neighborhood
gossip that Irimías and his sidekick Patrina (a mysterious pair reminding one
of Laurel and Hardy or, in more literary terms, Flaubert’s Bouvard and
Péchuchet) have been spotted nearby—and Schmidt’s plans suddenly change.
Through the next several rain-sodden hours, the movie, broken down into
12 parts (as in the movement of a tango, six steps forward and six steps back),
reveals the interrelationships of Futaki, Mr. and Mrs. Schmidt and the other
members of this community (the Kráner’s, the Halics, the local Doctor, the
nearby innkeeper, the village Principal, Mrs. Horgos and her two children Sanyi
and Estike) as they slowly move about the small town—or in the Doctor’s case,
as he voyeuristically observes them, writing down their dreams and failures in
what appear to be school notebooks.
By dinner time we have become so familiar with these individuals as we
witness the events of the day in which they split up their farm profit—most of
them preparing to leave their commune for the city—that they have been
transformed from mere characters into life-like figures interacting with our
own world.
In one segment we watch the Doctor in a perpetual fog of alcohol and
smoke while he eavesdrops on his neighbors until finally he is forced to leave
his house on a journey for more brandy. On several occasions along his way, we
encounter, through him, other characters tangentially connected to the story,
including, outside the bar, a young girl who calls out, as he sends her away.
The Doctor collapses before he can reach his destination, and is not rescued
until the next morning by a passing farmer in a cart.
Later, we follow the same young girl (Estike) through her day as her
mother forces her to remain outdoors in the rain while she beds down with one
of the farmers. The girl’s brother, Sanyi, has previously tricked her to give
up some coins which he buries, promising her it will grow into a money-tree.
Powerless, she tortures her cat before poisoning it; upon discovering the coins
have been dug up by Sanyi, she wanders aimlessly, clutching the dead cat to her
side, ultimately arriving at the inn where she witnesses through the window the
strange and almost comic tango of the drunken villagers within, and where she
calls out to the passing Doctor as we have seen her do in the earlier section.
Near a local ruin, she swallows the same rat poison she had fed the cat and
stretches out peacefully to die, convinced that in her acts she is now linked
to everything else.
In another movement forward, we wait within the inn as the villagers
gradually gather to reap their profits, and watch the tango from another
vantage point, recognizing it, this time round, as a true devil’s dance, the
haunting song played again and again upon the accordion as the locals weave—in
a Brueghel-like dance of death—and wind around each before they collapse. The
camera catches Estike this time at the window, looking in.
Through Tarr’s intricate interweaving of time and space, we gradually
learn to both love and loath each of these characters for their unfathomable
fears and hopes, their sexual and spiritual greed and pettiness. Mrs. Schmidt’s
easy virtue, Halics’ closeted sexuality, the Principal’s inflated sense of
superiority, the Innkeepers’ passive hatred, Schmidt’s coarse stupidity,
Futaki’s clever schemes—all reveal these men and women as being so locked into
the patterns of each other’s lives that we know they will never escape. All they
can do is wait for the inevitable, the return of Irimiás. As if bound to one
another with spiders’ webs these people have no other choice.
Indeed, when Irimiás arrives he
uses the discovery of the dead girl to his advantage, stunningly preaching a
sermon over her dead body, convincing these poor peasant folk to turn over
their new-found wealth to him for safe-keeping. He will meet them the next day
at a nearby ruined manor, where, after he has arranged everything with the
government, they will begin a new morally-grounded life. Like outcasts from
their own land (ironically, these folk vengefully destroy everything they
cannot take with them so as to make them unusable to the gypsies—people even
more outcast than themselves) they trek the pot-holed roads on their way to new
possibilities. The Manor, they discover, is in complete ruins, gutted, and they
are forced to huddle together in open rooms through the cold night.
The
next day, as Irimiás does not arrive, it begins to dawn on them that they have
been tricked (we already know the mysterious charmer is planning to use their
money for some vaguely revolutionary purpose—in the city he has ordered up vast
quantities of explosives); yet surprisingly he does return, lamely reporting
that the government has decided against their use of the Manor House, and
incredibly convincing them again to move on, this time scattering to separate
locations where they will bide their time until they can move back to the Manor
House.
One by one, the charming conniver calls out each couple’s new
destinations, providing them with enough money only until they are established
in their new positions. All blindly accept his definition of their new lives
except for Futaki, who insists we will work as a watchmaker, as a man, perhaps,
unlike the others, who will “fix” time.
The time Tarr (and the novelist on whose work this film based, the
wonderful Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai) portrays is indeed in need
of fixing. In the next step backward, we discover two government bureaucrats
rewriting a devastating report of these very people—a rhetorical attack on
every figure with whom we have now become so acquainted—by Irimías! He may have
radical aspirations, but he works, clearly, as an informer. Only Futaki is
described as having any intelligence, but dangerous for that very fact.
To be fair, we have witnessed an earlier scene wherein Irimías and
Petrina—having been called into headquarters—are chastised by a by a government
official for slacking. Clearly he has been ordered to provide information on
the commune workers, so we are uncertain whether the reports have been readily
offered up or whether Irimías has been forced or bribed to report on his former
“friends.” Given the virulence of his report, however, it hardly matters; the
informer has exceeded even the Doctor’s brutal observations of his neighbors.
And by substantiating their unworthiness he further prevents them from taking
action for his robbery of their money.
In the last section of this film, the Doctor, after weeks in a hospital,
returns home, filled cask in hand. The rain hides from him the very fact that
his subjects have all disappeared, as he dismisses them for remaining inside
all day, probably, he projects, sleeping in.
Suddenly, the church bells we have heard in the first scene eerily begin
to ring again, as the narrator’s voice—which we now recognize as being the
Doctor’s—repeats the first sentences of the film. Where are these bells coming
from? A visit by the Doctor to the local bombed out church only reveals a
madman banging upon a metal bar, shouting “The Turks are coming! The Turks are
coming!” But the bells we and the Doctor hear, the bells Futaki heard, are
oddly melodious, haunting in the tune they seem to play. The Doctor imagines
that he may be losing his mind, and slowly and patiently closes himself within
his room, boarding up his windows, retreating at the very moment when news from
some unknown source is traveling through the air.
What is coming their way? A change? Are the “turks,” a young, new force
truly on their way? Will the weak, the
foolish, the poor, be able to rise up against the fumblingly arrogant men like
Irimiás, or is the future Irimiás himself, a world in which such charlatans
will continue to cheat the everyday men and women from their just rewards?
All but my eyes remained dry. I was wide
awake.
Los Angeles, March 25, 2008
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (January 2009).
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