Facets continues to slowly make its way through the much vaunted but underdistributed corpus of Hungarian dyspeptic Béla Tarr, one of the planet's great cinematic formalists and, with Theo Angelopoulos and Aleksandr Sokurov, one of the reigning plan séquence masters. His earlier films, as courageously miserablist as his later ones, are all gritty realism; only with Damnation (1988) did Tarr find the even darker country he's been exploring sinceapocalyptically run-down, dead-or-dying villages on vast Mitteleuropan plains of mud, poverty, crushed will, delusionary behavior, and charcoal skies, all observed by a point of view that stalks silently and patiently through the ruins like a ghost. This small-framed filmmodest at least relative to the subsequent epics Satántángó and Werckmeister Harmoniestraces the self-destructive lives of two men and a weary bar singer in a mining town where anomie and liquored exhaustion infect their lives like a virus. Forged with veteran Tarr collaborators László Krasznahorkai (co-writer) and Gábor Medvigy (cinematographer), it's a serotonin-depleted ordeal, and yet seemingly a sketchbook of vibes and ideas to come, with some of the most magnificent black-and-white images shot anywhere in the world. Comes equipped with an essay-crammed booklet.
*indicates required fields. Please enable browser cookies before filling out this form. All reader comments are subject to our Terms of Use. By clicking Add Comment, you acknowledge that you have reviewed and agree to these Terms.
Comments may take a few minutes to process and appear on the site. Please do not click the "Add Comment" button again while your comment is being added.