Almanac of Fall
aka Öszi almanach First screened and reviewed in October 2005
Director: Béla Tarr. Cast: Hédi Temessy, Erika Bodnár, Miklós Skékely B., Pál Hetényi, János Derzsi. Screenplay: Béla Tarr. In Brief:
Darkly elegant, dramatically potent haunted-house tale of intramural recrimination. Requires but rewards patience.
VOR:③
Rigorous and audiovisually distinctive execution, even if the ideas are not entirely new. Hard to rate without knowledge of Tarr's later legacy.
In a spacious, well-ornamented, but mustily decrepit apartment, five lost souls wander the rooms and pair off into tough, Strindbergian conversations about their disappointments, their resentments, their secret bits of knowledge, and their palpably fleeting commitments. From this acrid pentagon of frustrated pleasure-seekers, Béla Tarr fashions a bleak but involving drama that eventually takes shape as a rather brilliant anatomy of domestic scapegoating. It turns out that four is company but five is a crowd, and with equal parts irony and predictability, the resident who most honestly confesses his sins and in many ways commits the most pardonable crime is hauled off by police; meanwhile, the four survivors waltz in a sort of dour dream sequence to the strains of "Que Sera Sera." Through color filters, simple framing, and spare edits, Tarr draws out the implicit and occasionally explicit violence of all this, and if he occasionally verges on a frustrating literalism—a shift in tint that corresponds to a swerve in allegiance, etc.—the magnificence of the acting and the gathering force of both plot and theme making for gripping viewing. Grade:A–
