As it turned out, yesterday was Hungary Day as far as my viewing went -- but I had lobster, not goulash for dinner. First I watched "Fateless", a 2003 holocaust movie following the trials and tribulations of a Budapest teenager when he is picked up and sent to various concentration camps. At well over two hours this was resolutely depressing, although very well made in black and white with a Morricone score. The lad only barely survived and was loaded on a cart ready for the crematorium when the camp was liberated; the Yank soldier with whom he interacted and who urged him not to return to Hungary turned out to be Daniel Craig (something of a shock that). But go back he does to discover what has become of his family. Oddly enough there was little bitterness in his memory as he recalled the small things that made his stay in the camps tolerable. This would definitely fall into the category of a "worthy" film, i.e. not one to be watched in terms of escape or entertainment.
In the evening we decided to watch "Satantango" (1994) by Hungarian director Bela Tarr which I bought Michael a Christmas or two ago, since he really liked Tarr's "Werckmeister Harmonies" (2000) which was a hard slog as far as I was concerned. Since "Satantango" runs seven hours (!), we only saw the first disc of three for just over the two hour mark. This movie may be considered Tarr's masterpiece and a film to be raved about, but several hours of watching black and white footage -- much of it more or less static -- of cows in a field or the back view of a drunken doctor walking to and from a shop was not an easy experience. As far as I can tell this film tells the interweaving stories of some inhabitants of a dead-end country village back in the 1980s. The American "intellectual" Susan Sontag claims that this is the greatest movie ever made and says she makes a point of watching it at least once a year; I suspect this is just another case of a so called great thinker being pretentious. And just think, there are still two discs to plough through. Super!
1 comment:
It was Christmas 2006 so it hasn't been that long! At the moment, my feelings about this film are mixed - he does take his time to end shots which can be more
than a little boring but there is something there as the actress said to the bishop
when he said he couldn't cope with his alb.
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