This is Bela Tarr's follow up to his seven-hour epic Satantango. This elegant, haunting work is about the cycles of violence that have dogged Eastern European history.This story takes place in a small town on the Hungarian Plain, which is surrounded by nothing but frost.Jancos is a wide-eyed innocent who works as an occasional postal worker and as a caretaker. He marvels at the miracles of creation, from the planets rotating in the heavens to the animals on earth. One fatal day, a circus featuring jars full of medical anomalies and a massive dead whale entombed in a corrugated metal trailer visits this depressed town. Another more sinister attraction is a shadowy figure dubbed "The Prince," whose nihilist rants incite the town's disaffected to riot. Tension in the town builds until, after one of The Prince's hate-filled speeches, throngs of angry men with blunt instruments ransack and brutalize a men's hospital ward. When the dust clears, lives are irrevocably changed.
Bela Tarr employs all of his groundbreaking techniques that made Satantango so unique. Long tracking shots, long holds on scene after the action has ceased. The only criticism I have is that the violence in the hospital scene is not convincing without the commensurate sound that would have been there in real life. A mob of enraged men is loud and vocal. I admit that the silent angry march was eerie and menacing but silent violence isn't. It's just odd. The way the tables are turned on poor Jancos is unexpected but it's a beautifully cynical twist to the end of a captivating film.
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