The Final 7½-Hour Boss of World Cinema
Plus: Two Fascinating Japanese Explorations of Family and Art
Satantango (1994)
Directed by Béla Tarr. Starring Mihály Víg, Putyi Horváth and Miklós B. Székely.
Bella Tarr’s Satantango has been on my watchlist since college. It stands as one of the final bosses of international cinema, thanks to its limited availability and, most of all, its titanic seven-and-a-half-hour runtime. It is universally lauded as one of the greatest achievements in world cinema. It took me almost ten years to work up the courage, and find the time, to watch it in one sitting, but I am so grateful I waited this long to see it.
The story follows a collective farm deep in the Hungarian countryside after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the people left behind to pick up the pieces. They are broken, lying, cheating, neglecting, and attempting to steal from one another. A former villager, long believed to be dead, suddenly returns and tries to gather them into a new commune, but there is little trust to be found and even more confusion.
Satantango is one of the most challenging but also one of the most rewarding films I have ever seen. It requires patience, life experience, familiarity with slow cinema (you should be comfortable with the pace of a Tarkovsky film), and, above all, endurance. Satantango is perhaps the slowest film I have ever seen. It is one of the few films in which time does not feel as though it was ever considered. Rather, Tarr submerges us in a world so bleak that it can be overwhelming at times. A feeling of hopelessness and loss permeates the film like a dead animal trapped in an air vent. The masterful long takes, averaging about 145 seconds per shot (the Hollywood average is between 2.5 and 3 seconds), practically hypnotize the audience into this bleak, muddy world, allowing time to pass much more quickly than one might expect. There are only about 150 cuts over the film’s seven-and-a-half-hour runtime, and each one genuinely feels like it matters.
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