Satantango (Bela Tarr, 1994)

10/10
When you spend almost 7 and a half hours in a theatre co-existing with a piece of art (okay call it "watching a movie" if you like), it's pretty hard not to at least force yourself to give it a perfect score, if not for justification that you didn't just waste a perfectly good Sunday on the thing. But that's not the case here as this movie fully deserves a perfect score. Unlike a movie that has so much plot it can't afford to lose a second off its running time (Erich von Stroheim's original cut of Greed, for example), Satantago could easily be compressed into 2 hours, possibly less. The plot is such: a broken-down, poor Hungarian town with a population of about 15 has come to the end of their harvest season - the villagers wait to collect their year's worth of wages and depart, but hold off when they hear that an ex-villager presumed dead, Irimias, is returning to town. The villagers have a shared fear and respect of Irimias, cautiously optimistic that he has a plan to lead them and the village.
That's pretty much it. Roughly the first four and a half hours is dedicated to the villagers anticipating Irimias' arrival. We see events in the village through their eyes, often with overlapping points of view. The shots are brutally long (some lasting up to 10 minutes in length, unbroken) and the sequeces are longer - we spend about 45 minutes, if not more, following the town doctor on his journey to get more brandy. Then at least half an hour with a young girl who, ignored by her mother and exploited by her mother, abuses and poisons her pet cat. A good half hour watching the townspeople get drunk, dance, and sing, as they await Irimias. And so on. By the movie's end you feel like you've been forced to live with these people, and in a way you have.
In the end it's impossible to say what the movie is "about". Without being too cliché, life. Moreso than any movie I've ever seen. This is a movie filled with nothingness but one that ruminates on everything. I encourage anyone with any kind of appreciation for cinema as art to go and see it if you have a chance (or buy the 3-disc DVD). It's something that's going to stay with me for the rest of my life, undoubtably.