Like a dream, Janos walks into a pub. It's only ten o'clock and pub is closing, but the men there are long past sober. One patron is so drunk he rolls off his chair and can hardly regain his footing. The bartend yells at his customers to leave, but they urge him to let them stay to allow Janos to work his magic. The bartend reluctantly approves. Janos sets up one man in the middle of the room, his hands beaming like the sun. Janos leads others to their positions in orbit around the central orb, stumbling drunks rotating about one another in the dance of the cosmos. The camera weaves in and out of the fray, rotating through the characters as Janos waxes philosophical on the nature of the universe and our place in it. How perfect is this long, languid shot that opens 'The Werkmeister Harmonies' by the inimitable Bela Tarr?
The film is a maze of existential musings, deliberate vagueries and systematic ambiguity. Taking place in a small town in Hungary, 'Werkmeister Harmonies' is an examination of good v. evil. One night a mysterious side show sets up in the town square, offering morbid delights including a giant, stuffed whale and a mysterious entity known as the Prince. We slowly realize that something is wrong, but no one knows what. In fact, the town remains ignorant to the circus' effect: of the townspeople, only Janos and his relations are concerned. So too however, is the viewer for the safety of the naive and precocious Janos, and his strange brood. Contrast the playful game Janos leads in the first scene with the harsh thuggery he encounters not only from the men who keep the whale, but from his former friends now dwelling in the town square.
While Janos's family prefer to form citizen's committees and consider calling in the army, Janos investigates the evil, surreptitiously finding his way inside the container holding the whale in an attempt to uncover the whale's secret, the power behind its dark allure, and the nature of the Prince, he who incites crowds with his nihilistic incantations and seems to be the key, and the cause, to the manifest evils destroying the village. "No ordinary force can hold him," Janos hears the circus director speaking of the Prince, "He is an aberration." As the Prince's shadow is cast in sharp chiaroscuro behind the director, the viewer is reminded of the Red Room from Twin Peaks. And indeed, 'The Wreckmeister Harmonies' should appeal to fans of David Lynch. But while Lynch's ruminations are all abstract, surreal, non-linear metaphysics, Bela Tarr's concerns are more allegory, philosophy, and existential dread. 'The Wreckmeister Harmonies,' as a tale of good and evil, tells of how darkness is never far from the core. But is the strange circus the cause of the town's black descent, or simply the catalyst for unacknowledged evil in all of us and everywhere, ill intentions that latently await the perfect moment for release? And if so, how are we to uncover the source of evil, its reality, before it's too late? In fact, as his neighbors are drawn towards the town square, to the Prince and his dark allure, Janos runs away. "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity." Something indeed is slouching towards Bethlahem to be born, possibly in the belly of the circus' rotting whale.
Long single shots are Tarr's modus operandi, and here the floating camera, following actors, somtimes trailing the action, becomes a character in itself, a strange, languid, totally subjective point of view. It navigates the darkness and the light, as a mediator, an observer, a journalist or documentarian. Consider the ransacking of a mental hospital. Cold and efficient in its brutality, the residents beat, their rooms uprooted and trashed, before they finally find an old man, virginal, bathed in white, fragile, like a child. The camera holds onto the image as the room clears of men, as if it too is shocked by the violence that has so suddenly been exposed for all its barbarity and sadism. Ultimately, the white light overpowers the darkness, but we are left to doubt whether the victory is complete: darkness is never far away, and it only takes a moment to overpower the best of man's intentions.
Werckmeister Harmonies - 9/10
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