Opiniões dos críticos

Both a masterpiece and a badge of honour for its survivors, Béla Tarr's extraordinary 1994 adaptation of László Krasznahorkai's novel Sátántangó achieves the purest imaginable distillation of a particular arthouse aesthetic, and - not coincidentally - stakes some claim to being the least commercial movie ever made.

[W]hatever Tarr's protestations to the contrary, I'll submit that he's actually a hell of a storyteller and far more accessible than his reputation would suggest, with the most graceful and straightforward control of nonlinear chronology going.

This is an experience that, by its nature, has a niche appeal, and between those who submit themselves to it, there exists a sort of camaraderie, a knowledge of belonging to the ranks of the hardcore.

The film unfolds in minute detail, far more concerned with the lives of the inhabitants than with the ostensible story at its centre. With its labyrinthine structure (which twists, turns and falls back in on itself), Sátántangó demands to be seen in a single sitting.

Everything that made Tarr an arthouse luminary lives here, in between the caustic humor, the political malevolence, and the dark, solemn beauty of the camera that binds it all together.

Allegorical yet historically precise, it is an anti-authoritarian satire and metaphysical treatise. In addition, it might well be the great film of entropy.

Stunningly filmed in black-and-white, with long panning shots and an epic length (over seven hours), Sátántangó is a powerful commentary on utopian thinking—from Christianity to socialism.

For Tarr, the paradox of tangled distraction and bewildered rootlessness coinciding with a way of life that’s inseparable from the grimy facts of the mucky earth—one that he gets at with immensely long, sinuous takes that might superficially resemble Krasznahorkai’s stretched-out sentences—is the human condition.

Tarr sarcastically depicts society as a weak, ineffectual construct meant to provide structure and purpose in a purposeless world. SÁTÁNTANGÓ is a brilliant, haunting opus that knows more about us than we know ourselves.

The movie unspools like a modernist novel in which the audience is asked to supply much of the prose, and oddly enough, what might seem tedious at four hours is more enveloping at almost twice that length.

With fewer shots than the average 90-minute feature, Sátántangó is a double tour de force—for the actors, as the camera circles them in lengthy continuous takes, and for Tarr, who constructs his narrative out of these morose blocks of real time.

It’s the cumulative alliance of a number of contrasted themes that reveals the irony of its being: that it’s at once sympathetic and patronizing, both tragic and satiric. And it’s this insidious yet ambiguous political nature that characterizes Sátántangó as a distinctly Hungarian vision, in turn perpetuating its obscurity and qualifying its art.