In short: Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)

A circus attraction – including a dead whale and someone we never get to see and will only know as “The Prince” who agitates for maximum chaos – comes to a small town in Hungary. Its influence brings to the surface all of the hidden nastiness in the place and its people, the anger, the fascist longings - all very European, really. We witness the ensuing catastrophe through the eyes of János (Lars Rudolph), a young man who is at once incredibly naïve and the only one in town who has an understanding of how the world actually works on a physical and scientific level, finding a sense of wonder even in the blackness between the stars. You can imagine how this will work out for him.

This Béla Tarr/Ágnes Hranitzky (a lot of arthouse affine critics like to ignore Hranitzky’s co-director credits for three of Tarr’s films, probably because of something unsavoury about women getting in the way of someone’s auteur theory) joint based on a novel by László Krasznahorkai is an often strikingly beautiful film – typically in its bleakness – with some incredibly composed and choreographed long shots, a slow hypnotic tempo, and performances that manage to work inside of the film’s atypical ideas about pacing without feeling wrong or artificial.

Of course, all of this artfulness stands in service of a world view I would call nihilist if the filmmakers would make the impression they were actually alright with the state of the world as they see it. It’s about as bleak as they come in any case, with János’s destruction feeling as inevitable as it is painful – and really, much worse than the self-destruction of the town itself.

Apart from the obvious allegories about fascism, bourgeois humanism, and so on, as well as some more specifically Hungarian elements I’m not at all sure I really get, which at times feel a little too obvious and too pat to me (which is still better than most allegories do), there’s this sense of bigger and even darker philosophical concerns running through the film, a mood I’m rather tempted to call embittered cosmicism which to me is the true fascination of Werckmeister Harmonies. It’s an effusive and difficult sense, as if the filmmakers were expressing some dark and lonely feeling they themselves couldn’t quite put into words, but that could be put into a series of long shots called Werckmeister Harmonies.