Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by tinear (A) on March 08, 2009 at 21:25:08

On my second visit, I liked it even more than my first enthusiastic experience.
In a small, dark (this is a Bela Tarr film, after all), rainy town whose only business appears to be mining, a man is consumed with the wife of another; she seems to see him as nothing but a diversion whilst her husband is away.
The lover asks her to escape the town, her marriage, and her daughter and he plans some sort of illegal activity to finance it.
Tarr, whose style is quite different from Tarkovsky's but almost as inscrutable, is not a plot driven director; yet, one becomes inexplicably involved in the fate of the characters. Unlike, say, the characters in "Watchmen," these are people with feet of clay; still, the bleakness, the sense of doom and melancholy is inescapable and far more harrowing.
And Tarr's is a subtle intelligence: a long shot in a bar, with camera movement somehow coordinated between focusing and panning, gradually reveals surprise after surprise, injecting understanding and motive into the characters action and non-action.
If Dostoevsky had made films, this is what they would have looked like.
A brilliant masterpiece by one of the true geniuses in modern film.