The film’s opening shows Janos trying to get some local drunkards in the town bar (bars are a frequent Tarr setting) to understand more intimately their place in the cosmic way of things. He has one pretend to be the sun, another the earth, and a third the moon, to explain the power of what seems to be a coming eclipse; one that he rhapsodizes on in pseudopoetry. The choreography (naturally clumsy) and a great piano score make the scene incredibly moving, and within the first ten minutes of this film a Tarr viewer realizes that, yet again, the master has upped the ante of his cinematic skills, for lack of emotion has been a frequent charge against Tarr’s earlier works. Tarr knows when to use music and not. Too many films slather music over every scene, but most of Tarr’s scenes play out with real world sounds. This makes the intrusion of music more effective, for it not only signifies something deeper is happening, but Tarr only uses music when it adds to the scene.
Soon, however, weirdness infects the town. First, an old time carnival hits town, and its center attractions are a stuffed blue whale, hauled about inside a trailer truck, and an unseen and enigmatic figure called The Prince. The name of the character naturally invokes the work by Machiavelli, and the Luddite-like character, seen (in shadow) and heard (speaking Slovakian, according to several European critics) only once in the film, seems to justify the title, even as his words invoke the memory of an earlier Tarr con man, Irimias, from Satantango. Yet we never really see the Prince evoke any of the mind control that seems to seize the town. All of this occurs offstage, and wisely so, for triteness would have infected any Jim Jones-like scenes of the gull and his gulled. It also leaves up in the air whether or not the violence that follows is solely caused by The Prince, or other things, like a superstitious fear of the implications of an eclipse; thus placing The Prince in a precarious perch as a possible Rasputin, who causes evil, but leaves its deliverance to fools.
The other major character in the film is Eszter’s ex-wife, Tunde (Hanna Schygulla, a star of Rainer Werner Fassbinder films), who tries to blackmail her ex-husband into supporting some political propositions she wants enacted. The fact that the violence that ensues in the film is open for debate makes Tunde a possible cause of it. She heads a movement calling for the cleansing of the town. Be it ‘ethnic cleansing’ or a hard line sort of temperance movement is never specified. Her current beau seems to be the town’s drunken constable, and even in just the few scenes she is in she wreaks a creepy malevolence and hold over men, Janos included. A number of scenes from the middle of the film are outstanding: Janos’s first encounter with the dead whale in the trailer, and looking into its lifeless yet all-seeing eye, Janos and Eszter walking to the town center together, wordlessly, after Eszter learns of his ex-wife’s threats. That the two men say little speaks much of their relationship.
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