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The Werckmeister Harmonies

(Werckmeister harmóniák, Béla Tarr, Hungary, 2000)


 


On the matter of Béla Tarr's vast reputation at the hem of World Cinema, I remain a sceptic. His The Werckmeister Harmonies marks a long drop in quality from Sátántango (1993).

In The Werckmeister Harmonies, the political incoherence of Tarr's turgid melodrama is evident: its surreal premise of a show-whale come to town (traces here of Raúl Ruiz and J. G. Ballard's story "The Drowned Giant") unleashes a clumsy free-for-all of the "revolting masses" that leads to some awfully windy poetic rhetoric (the naked old man awaiting his fate in the trashed hospital).

And stylistically, Tarr's work – for all its daring and determination, and despite its merry shotgun marriage of Jancsó formalism and Kusturica party-energy – is terribly uneven; not all of his long takes "take", and brilliant passages of sound design can be followed (this is the case in Sátántango) by a couple of hours of no sound design at all.

© Adrian Martin May 2001


Film Critic: Adrian Martin
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