Review: Damnation

In a world is as bleak and overwhelming as the one Béla Tarr envisions here, even a half-hearted pop song feels like good medicine.

Damnation
Photo: Hungarian Film Institute

Anyone who’s passed the endurance test that is Sátántangó, Béla Tarr’s 450-minute epic that represents in slow-crawl detail the disintegration of a Hungarian farm community, may expect his other work to be less weighty. But, then, those viewers probably haven’t seen his existentialist nightmare Werckmeister Harmonies, whose phantasmagoria includes the dramatization of a solar eclipse by a holy fool among the boozy all-nighters at the local bar, a mummified whale that stands in as a vast allegorical leviathan, and a mob of peasants that gathers in the town square to build bonfires and stoke their resentment before laying siege upon a ramshackle hospital. For all the talk of Tarr’s best work moving at the speed of a glacier, tremendous social unrest leads to apocalyptic upheavals within the worlds of Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies.

Still, those familiar with Tarr’s work may be surprised by the comparatively small scale of 1988’s Damnation. Imagine a love triangle where a worker (the strong silent type) in a mining town falls desperately in love with an unhappily married cabaret singer (the femme fatale) who dreams of a life in the big city. He schemes her husband out of the picture by involving him with some corrupt smugglers, and indulges in an extramarital affair with her where he promises her that if she wants the moon, she can have it. This unhappy little tale ends badly for everyone, since they’re ultimately ignorant peasants trapped in a life of quiet desperation. Damnation is devoted to noir tropes but stretches each familiar-seeming moment into a long-running, slow-moving, somnambulistic shot that will be familiar to Tarr’s fans.

Those new to Tarr’s “cinema of patience,” as Chicago-based distributor Facets Video puts it, shouldn’t start with Damnation and are advised to heed this advice: Watch some of his other films first, preferably Werckmeister Harmonies. Viewers are well advised to consider that the famous opening shot of Sátántangó is a crawling 10-minute depiction of cows emerging from a barn and stupidly wandering through the rain and mud, and that shot is very active in comparison to the drawn-out beginning of Damnation, wherein mining cable cars, glimpsed from an open window, cary minerals back and forth in the distance.

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Eventually, it’s revealed that we’re witnessing the point of view of the worker, Karrer (Miklós Székely B.), from his spare and lonely apartment. Then we see him shaving his coarse, rough-hewn face, a tough-looking mug. This time, the camera hardly wavers, and we’re stuck on Karrer and the slow, scraping sound of the razor going up and down, up and down. If you haven’t figured it out by now, things move very slowly and repetitively here, and as a spectator you’ll be as longing for escape from the mundane, boring routine as Karrer is.

Escape is found in the club, where patrons sit glazed over thick mugs of beer as the singer (Vali Kerekes) is slumped over a stool, hanging onto the microphone as though she might fall over otherwise, muttering in a seemingly half-asleep way through a despondent love song about how there’s really not much chance of finding love, and the need for the hopeless to dream of Shangri-La. Though it might seem like a dead crawl of a musical number, we’re so inured to a world where so little transpires, even a mild thread of hope gets you to perk up your ears, and respond as Karrer does to the thought that she could bring him a small shread of happiness. The black-and-white photography by Gábor Medvigy is purposefully leaden and oppressive like the world of the film, all never-ending rain, muddy streets, cramped houses, wandering mongrel dogs, and half-empty packs of cigarettes. Indeed, this world is so bleak and overwhelming that even a half-hearted pop song feels like good medicine.

Tarr’s gaze is heroically unblinking, but when his films achieve brilliance, it’s because he places within their world something loaded with mercurial power. The hero of Werckmeister Harmonies is commonly referred to as a holy fool, but is in fact an articulate philosopher with a sense of poetry and a flair for drawing out members of the community with his cosmic passions. He has dreams and visions, which are gradually snuffed out by the forceful pessimism of Tarr’s cinematic space, his representation of peasant class rage being kindled by baroque mysticism. By contrast, the characters in Damnation simply move toward their grim fates as if they were no smarter, no more audacious in their choices, than the lumbering cows of Sátántangó. Damnation’s people, in a sense, are like animals, beginning their day as it ends, trapped inside their cages. Tarr’s fascination with their ennui is profound, and while his statement about them isn’t lacking in visual power and philosophical heft, it’s also questionable whether it’s the strongest statement an artist of his caliber can make.

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Score: 
 Cast: Miklós Székely B., Vali Kerekes, György Cserhalmi, Hédi Temessy, Gyula Pauer  Director: Béla Tarr  Screenwriter: László Krashnahorkai, Béla Tarr  Running Time: 116 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1988  Buy: Video

Jeremiah Kipp

Jeremiah Kipp is a New York City based writer, producer and director with over ten years experience creating narrative and commercial films.

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