Oftentimes, when bad critics run out of clever things to say about a film or director that they like, but know few others will appreciate, they will trot out the old ‘he’s an acquired taste’ gambit. Well, this is not true of Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr. One simply appreciates a master craftsman at the top of his game, or not. It is one of the rarest things in art, to be able to ‘turn on’ someone to appreciate greatness. In fact, putting art aside, greatness is one of the things most difficult to comprehend; and this is, ironically, the very thing that Tarr’s 2000 film, Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister Harmóniák), is about.
Yes, there are issues of loneliness, mob psychology, human inanity, and violence, and many critics, from the bad to the mediocre to the good, have taken shots at cracking this film’s so-called meaning; yet, in the end, human difficulty in the face of greatness is what the film really is about. Some characters struggle with the greatness of art (music, specifically), others with the greatness of what they see as divine power, others with the greatness of a figure shrouded in Oz-like mystery, but all of these characters struggle with their lack of measurement up to greatness of one sort or another.
The film runs 145 minutes, but the long shots compress in one’s memory, making his films seem far shorter than temporally shorter films. As with many of his later films, this one is based on a László Krasznahorkai novel, The Melancholy of Resistance. Krasznahorkai and Tarr have to be considered one of the premier writer-director tandems in cinema history, for all of their work stretches the boundaries of the art of film. The title of the film refers to Andreas Werckmeister, a 17th century German musical theorist who created the 12-tone scale. One of the characters in the film, a famed local composer and musicologist, György Eszter (Peter Fitz), is seen speaking of his theory that Werckmeister’s harmonic principles in music are somehow responsible for aesthetic and philosophic problems in music and life ever since.
The film, however, mainly follows a nephew of his, Janos Valuska (Lars Rudolph). He seems to be a young man with no direction in life. He wanders about town, helping his uncle, the town’s local ‘great man.’ Yet, there is a yearning for depth and meaning in him. Like many folks, he has no real way to express his feelings, so acts as the de facto observer in the film’s diegesis. He may have a job as a postal deliveryman, but seems so anomic that one never knows if this is a job or just his natural trait of trying to ingratiate himself to others. Another point of confusion is Janos’s relationship to Eszter and others. Since he uses the term of uncle and aunt so freely, either the town is composed of only a few extended families, or it’s an honorific to show respect to his elders. There are several moments when he refers to Eszter, when speaking to others, as Mr. Eszter, not ‘my uncle.’ So, he may simply be a fool, an idiot savant, or hopelessly naïve and gullible. Regardless, he and Eszter share a house, and seem to be among the better off inhabitants of the dreary little burg, out on the high hibernal Hungarian plains.
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