recommended

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

This is pure cinema, the triumph of cinema in our little planet. Like a flower that the observer is waiting to blossom to give him his beauty, wants time and patience, as everything is worth in this life.Alongside with Tarkovsky, Bela Tarr is the last director -philosopher in our time.

How to engage emptiness, visually? This is the most tasking difficulty that I know of in film, for both the filmmaker and viewer. You cannot merely look - sitting still is not meditation - it needs to be a particularly sharpened but effortless way of looking. Seeing things without the person that sees obscuring the view.Only the Buddhist have adequately solved this to my mind, by tying into an actual practice of purging the self so that we got a work, a painting, poem or flower arrangement, that was itself an act of meditation. But they had centuries ahead of them to refine. In film, I can always count on Bela Tarr for a vision of formative emptiness, and ways to engage that emptiness as a space for contemplation. No doubt he has studied Mizoguchi for the 'mono no aware' of a transient sorrowful world, itself derived from the Buddhist eye. And even more Tarkovsky, in more explicitly adopting his omniscient camera for the reflections. The gloomy darkness he surrounds it with no doubt comes from Eastern Europe as churned from the broken machinery of decades old communism. It is implicit in everything he does, always iron cast in punishing ways. At least this part doesn't require any more comments I feel. The impressions of abstract horror are from a life lived.So it is a dark world rolling into the night that we are given here, from the memory of it, a kind of nightbound universe. How to struggle from our end? Why, most importantly, why even admire the great whale, if the whole is nothing?Of course, it is nothing less than simple honesty on Tarr's part for presenting a world as he does, as we know historically up to now. For the most, it is the Prince that humanity has been the most eager to hear, someone to incite change. There is no time to see the great whale whose body encompasses the world, the wonder of that emptiness that can generate form of such awesome beauty. The only thing that has power to halt the rampaging mob then is a vision of their own mortality.So in several ways, one is tempted to imagine a kinship between him and Trier; an encounter with the void, and human wretchedness in the face of that encounter. But I posit Tarr to be a wiser filmmaker, especially here.Look how he opens the film for example, a magnificent round-up even more pertinently addressing now, our microcosmic cycle mirrored from above, with humans dancing into position of the spheres. This is a filmmaker who understands. The only problem; the Nietzchean dismay he seems to have resigned himself to. The last bit of news is that he has decided to stop making films altogether. His worldview is a bleak one, no doubt.But it's an honest dismay, a way of confessing that he knows there will be light again in principle but can't seem to see any. It's a profoundly human despair, how he wearily examines the broken whale at the end. So the problem remains, one of embodying a world where, by simply existing, we are negations of that primal void. Isn't that what we're taught? So how to embrace the great whale then?The film ends here. It falls on us to see beyond the dark, and see if we can embrace the whale by seeing that the whole and nothing is the one.

The DVD, put out by Facets Video, is a good one, qualitatively. But, it is utterly bare bones: no commentary, no trailer, no featurettes. Its only 'extra' is a small booklet with essays on Tarr and the specific film, However, when a film is this great, it doesn't really matter. The sound quality is very good, and the film is in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio. There is one BIG negative, though, and that is the white subtitling Facets employs. I've often ripped on titles from The Criterion Collection for this flaw, but this particular Facets DVD is even worse, for not only are the subtitles white, but very thin. Also, there are several scenes where the extreme white in the cinematography (excellent by Medvigy Gábor, and supposedly composed of less than 40 actual shots in the film- claims range from 33-39, which, according to legend, allowed Tarr to edit the film in less than a day) almost totally blanches out what one can read. What the hell is wrong with the folks in the subtitles department? Is it too damned much to add a bit of gold, or even some black trim about the subtitles so that they can actually be read? It's bad enough DVD companies skimp on English language dubs, but illegible subtitles? The score (piano and violin), by Míhaly Vig, who played Irimias in Satantango, is spare, but highly effective, as any scoring should be, and its likely the best in the Tarr films I've seen, adding to the reality that this film is the most emotional of the films, as well. Some critics, however, have taken issue with the film's scoring, claiming that the film argues that music is an immanently flawed vehicle to base any sort of foundation upon, thus the film's score is at odds with its artistic claim. But, this is clearly wrong, since the film does not argue that music is immanently flawed, just one of its characters does- Eszter.Another error that many critics have made is calling Werckmeister Harmonies a minimalist film. It is not. It's amazing how many critical notions in art and life are flawed simply due to the critic's inability to understand the definitions of the very terms they use. Minimalism is when a work of art is reduced to its barest minimum- i.e.- some of the Absurdist plays of a Samuel Beckett, or some scenes in George Lucas's THX 1138 or some films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, come to mind. These critics conflate mere economy with strict minimalism, but there's a world of difference. Minimalism is not just a spare setting, but that spare setting with a singular focus, a character or two, and brevity in action. Economy can have multiple characters, themes, and plot points, but be told in broad, singular strokes. This far more fits the description of a Tarr film, including this one. The film is not larded down with symbolism, but the few moments of such are ripened and potent. The scenes with the whale, never seen in its entirety, when seen by Janos, but only in the final scene, with Eszter, is a good example; for when we see what has so enraptured Janos, in the daylight, it is not nearly as mysterious nor awe inspiring as when we see only glimpses of it in shadow. To paraphrase, the elephant that the seven blind men feel, in the old parable, will always be more interesting and exciting than if they could see the real beast. Werckmeister Harmonies is not minimalist; in fact, it's the exact opposite, it's loaded with meaning, detail, and subtlety. And the elephant also hearkens back to the ending of Federico Fellini's masterful La Dolce Vita, and its ending with the discovery of a manta ray's corpse, and its all seeing eye.Despite many of the critical misreadings, Werckmeister Harmonies is a truly great film; audacious in its depiction of reality, however askew, and even bolder in its plumb of human consciousness; especially in its relationship to things greater than the self. That it does not lay out all its cards on the table for immediate perusal is not a weakness, but a strength, in that it invites rewatches. If all films offered only a quarter of what this film does, cinema would be far better for it. But, when given a rare full plate, like this, it's OK to gorge between the famines. Grace is optional.

In modern cities, we're bombarded by sounds and images all the time, creating over-stimulation. As a result, we can't feel very strongly about any one thing we see. Werckmeister Harmonies takes place in a small Hungarian town, where not much ordinarily happens. The citizens are under-stimulated, and as a result, have the sacred ability to be moved to the core by small things. Bela Tarr wants us to be able to experience this with the townsfolk, and goes through great pains to do so. The film is made up of only 39 shots, each one spanning at least several minutes. As with Satantango, they chronicle the monotony of village life: long dreary walks, manually heating up water, the unhurried conversation.While I wouldn't say I found every moment of Werckmeister Harmonies riveting (perhaps the non-city dweller may fare better), I can easily say I did myself a favor by watching it. First of all, the imagery: Bela Tarr captures some of the most enchanting and unique images you'll ever see on film. The ambitious art direction and cinematography are perfectly realized, and the skill and artistry in the single-take scenes found here is astounding.The film's simple but beautiful soundtrack works well, and Tarr combines it masterfully with his imagery, creating a lot of memorable and powerful moments.My only complaint is that Bela Tarr hasn't mastered dialog to the extent that his predecessors have. Some of the dialog-driven scenes feel a bit stale, and serve to work against the wondrous tone that he painstakingly creates. But all is forgiven when the dialog fades and he is able to focus on poetic expression through imagery. Who else can make a circling helicopter appear so organic, and so strange?Also recommended: Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice and Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor.