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The
Werckmeister Harmonies
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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 |