Its seven-hour runtime warns off dabblers, the one-screening-a-day bulk defies profit motive, and its protagonists -- Tarr's "poor, ugly, sad, and damned people" -- deny expectations of pleasure. It is also, at times, funny as hell.
Overview
Inhabitants of a small village in Hungary deal with the effects of the fall of Communism. The town's source of revenue, a factory, has closed, and the locals, who include a doctor and three couples, await a cash payment offered in the wake of the shuttering. Irimias, a villager thought to be dead, returns and, unbeknownst to the locals, is a police informant. In a scheme, he persuades the villagers to form a commune with him.
Director and cast
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
Top critics, in their words
The marathon Satan's Tango is a magnum opus to end all magna opera, a dark, funny, apocalyptic allegory of the Hungarian psyche that stimulates, irritates, soothes and startles with blinding strokes of genius in equal turn.
Critics have rightfully hailed Tarr as one of filmdom's criminally undersung geniuses.
In Satantango, life is beautiful and grotesque by turns, and never less than mesmerizing.
This startling, apocalyptic work is sometimes over-extended, but it builds to a powerful, rhythmic climax of breakdown and withdrawal.
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