Bela Tarr’s seventh film, a melancholy meditation on social disorder and senseless violence, begins with an enigmatic scene in a bar. Janos Valuska, a postman in a small Hungarian village, recruits three patrons to enact the heavens’ rotations. One man serves as the sun, vibrating his fingers to simulate its rays, while the other two play the earth and moon. Valuska sets them spinning about each other, stopping them to simulate a solar eclipse. Shot in a single ten-minute take, this sequence acquires resonance as the film progresses, coming to stand for a quest for harmony in a world that’s falling apart. But appreciating its full import depends on understanding the musical reference in the film’s title, which most critics have missed.
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One of Valuska’s duties is to care for retired music professor Gyuri Eszter. In response to the mounting troubles, Eszter’s estranged wife, Tunde, founds a political movement requiring a “strong leader”; its goal is to “restore order, create cleanliness”–phrases with fascist echoes. She enlists the respected Eszter as that leader. But despite their efforts, crowds of men gather in ominous silence around the whale and grow uglier, and near the end a large group of club-wielding men invades the local hospital, beating up patients and smashing equipment.
Until the hospital scene near the end, there’s little action–what makes the film gripping is the sense of dread created by Tarr’s camera. Continuing the long-take style of the opening (which reiterates the long sentences of the novel on which the film is based, Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance), Tarr builds a subtle suspense: we wait for things to fall apart. The men in the market square seem statues frozen in space, but the camera’s movements around them emphasize their dynamically disordered arrangement. Long takes also serve as a reminder that time has its own autonomy–it’s apart from humans’ lurching violence. As the hospital invasion begins, the camera slowly approaches a brightly lit doorway; when men rush by, the camera tries to follow them from room to room but can’t keep up with their rampage. More deliberate, its movements measure time with an almost metronomic inevitability, intensifying our sense of the devastation by making clear that destruction, like time, cannot be reversed.
But basing musical scales on simple ratios leads to contradictions, such as octaves that aren’t true–the impetus behind equal temperament, which emerged in the Renaissance. But some, like Eszter, consider every interval except the octave in this system “impure” and “out of tune.” This is a debate that continues today: composer La Monte Young, for example, argues vehemently against equal temperament as unharmonious and retuned a piano according to whole-number ratios for his The Well-Tuned Piano.
