If you’ve heard of Sátántangó, a legendary 1994 film that has yet to play in Boston, and if you know that it’s seven and a quarter hours long, you might be scared of its director, the Hungarian Béla Tarr. So I should start by saying that Werckmeister Harmonies, Tarr’s follow-up, runs under two and a half hours and is compulsively watchable. And I should make it clear that Tarr is a visionary who’s at least as terrific as some people claim Theo Angelopoulos is, and probably as great as I wish Alexander Sokurov were (to name the two best-known living directors who have anything in common with him).

In a Hungarian town in winter, village idiot savant János (Lars Rudolph) keeps busy doing a paper route and being the devoted caregiver to the town’s leading citizen, a retired music teacher (Peter Fitz). Walking through town on his various errands, János notices the stir caused by the arrival of a circus. He’s impressed by its purported main attraction, the carcass of a huge whale, but it’s the Mabuse-like presence of a mysterious “Prince” that draws increasing numbers of hostile-looking men to the town square where the circus has pulled up. Congregating around fires, the men drink, glare, stamp their feet, and wait for the order that will turn them into a rampaging mob. Meanwhile, the music teacher’s venal wife (Hanna Schygulla) conspires with her lover, the police chief, to exploit the situation.

Tarr’s hypnotic black-and-white long takes are soaked with the reality of space, distance, and time. In the first shot, János choreographs a group of closing-time bar drinkers in a rapturous demonstration of the movements of the solar system. This exhilarating shot, which lasts 10 minutes, is a deceptively hopeful prologue to a journey film in which wonder mixes more and more with terror. The long takes in Werckmeister Harmonies are extraordinary technical achievements, but Tarr isn’t one of those directors for whom a complicated shot is a chase after personal glory. These long takes are not advertisements that he’s ready to direct the next Mission: Impossible movie. They’re not advertisements for anything. They’re adventures.

The film creates a vivid sense of the reality of the townspeople and their daily lives, even though Tarr deliberately makes their social relations hard to decipher. In this depiction of the uncertain Eastern European system, old privileges and allegiances still hold, but in a ghostly way — as if they were superimposed fadingly over a new, unpredictable configuration, where the only outcome that can be envisaged is disaster.

Ambiguity is necessary for Tarr’s purposes. The whale, which János recognizes as a miraculous creature, conceals the poison of demagoguery. But Tarr doesn’t hold out this duality as a source of comfort or as the mark of a “magical reality” — to do that would only assent to fascism. The miracle, as János perceives it, is all bound up with a stale, going-through-the-motions carny exhibitionism and with the tactility of rotting whale flesh covered in fixative and turned into plastic.

As you delve into Werckmeister Harmonies, it’s not too clear what world this is, what’s underneath, behind, and beyond its visible surfaces, or where you’re going to end up. Neither do these things need to become clearer — the adventure of this film isn’t a progressive clarification, a mystery unraveling. What is the movie about, then? It’s about systems that organize perception, about how the system needs people to believe in it and how people want to believe in the system (hence János’s demonstration in the first shot). It’s about the goodness of János and how, in a bad world, this goodness resembles sickness. It’s about spirit: the spirit of places; the spirit of people who understand the importance of doing things for other people; the spirit of people who care about music and philosophy; the darker, burnt-out spirit of those who feel only power. And it’s about movements: the mob’s massing in the square; its orderly, Fritz Lang–like march through the streets; the mindless and terrifying destruction; and, against all this, the perpetual walking of János, which comes to look like a desperate bid to sustain the timelessness of a community where time is about to explode.

Issue Date: March 22-29, 2001