Damnation

1988 Bela Tarr existential feel-good movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A somber guy in a gray world wanders around in slow motion. His reason for living is a lounge singer he occasionally sleeps with who, unfortunately, is married. He comes up an ingenious scheme to get rid of the husband for a while so that he can have sex with his mistress in slow motion while it rains outside and dogs scavenge in the streets.

I decided some time last year that I was going to limit myself to one movie directed by Bela Tarr, the likely chipper fellow who directed the best new-to-me movie that I saw in 2011, per year, one that I would watch without my pants on a sunny summer day. They're not exactly uplifting, and as much as I enjoyed Werckmeister Harmonies, more than one movie a year like that would more than likely lead to me taking my own life. This one is just as dismal with its grayness, its long shots, its nasty weather, and its sad characters. Perhaps my expectations were just a little too high, but I was disappointed in this one. The biggest issue for me was that it was too talky. And I'm not sure if it was weirdly translated or just weirdly written, but the philosophical mumbo-jumbo the characters uttered in this was really hard for me to keep track of. I found myself losing interest and then losing track of what the main character was talking about in the middle of his sentences. His story was deceptively simple, so simple that stretching it into a little over two hours might seem excruciatingly boring for a lot of people. This wasn't quite the visual thrill of Werckmeister, and I can't believe I just used the word thrill and the title of that movie in the same sentence. The slowly panning camera, the drab settings, the lingering on objects or characters long after the typical viewer would be done with them, and the choreographed glacial sludge won't fool anybody into thinking this is a different director though. It's all so quietly, often motionless enough to make a viewer uncomfortable, the most exciting movements often being the perpetual drizzle. In fact, when there is activity in some scenes, it's almost shocking. I felt my heart rate go up during a shot when a guy danced on a slab of concrete in the middle of a downpour following a slow pan over all these dismal faces. And there are a couple scenes I guess I would call party scenes--flutes/accordion/piano/drum quartets, holding hands and walking in slow circles, a guy being swung in a chair held by two other guys--that show that Hungarians really know how to throw down. There's another weird scene where the music being played doesn't come close to matching what the musicians are doing which was weird. The mood is also strengthened with sound effects--a reverberating hum throughout the first ten minutes, inexplicable creaks and clicks and drips. In fact, following the alien ambiance of the first couple scenes of this movie, when some somber accordion music begins, it almost sounded like LMFAO to me. It builds to a depressing (of course) climax with a thrilling (oh, there's that word again) fight scene between a man and a dog.

I believe the Hungarian Will Ferrell is in this.

Bela Tarr, by the way, was apparently booted from a philosophy program for being too extreme. He's also announced that he's retired from film making to concentrate on his film school.