Werckmeister Harmonies

Director: Bela Tarr

2000 / 145min / DCP

A traveling circus touting the display of an honest-to-God whale rolls into a blighted backwater of a Hungarian village already preparing for apocalypse, and their arrival upends the entire social order, troubling the established relationships between social classes, families, and lovers. Awash in feelings of cosmic impotence and hopelessness, Tarr’s film, an adaptation of László Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance, is nevertheless a curiously pleasurable outing for the frigid beauty of its black-and-white photography, and the gleeful resignation of Tarr’s gallows humor.