Almanac of Fall (1984)

I tried hard to like Almanac of Fall - it's a Bela Tarr movie (I usually love his films) and the use of colors and shapes was simply marvellous. But this was just not that good a movie, despite its aesthetic brilliance (which is a reason why you SHOULD watch it!). It seemingly emulates the gloom and cynism of Fassbinder, but there's little of Fassbinder's social critique in Almanac of Fall. That is, as far as I can see, but I guess one could read a critique of the capitalist unit of the family into it and perhaps one could say that Tarr shows a recurring set of relational formations in which paranoia and reality coalesce. Distrust is the order of the day. The claustrophobic feel of the movie - which takes place in one slightly dilapidated apartment - never reveals anything. As a viewer I'm thrown into that sense of crammed space, locked relations, plots and scheming. The characters all have tangled, often erotic, relations with each other. There's the ailing matriarch, her nurse, the son, the nurse's lover and an alcoholic teacher. The only glimpse we get of their lives is through their constant quarelling, their constant suspicion and bitterness - ceaseless consternation. The amour going on here is of the doomed sort and its center of gravity is the nurse, who is depicted as the leathal femme fatale - and believe me, there is more than a hint of sexism in how women's sexuality is treated here: female sexuality as dangerous, deparaved and voluptuous - female sexuality opens Pandora's box, yes we've heard that before. The existential sordidness - greed, mostly - on display churns and churns and churns. In that sense, the movie does not have much to offer, as Tarr seems to have very little insightful to say about these relations, or the characters' malaise. It's just there. In later films, Tarr's pessimism attains an altogether different level of communication, so that he lets the visualization itself conjure up an often elusive sense of apocalypse or social catastrophy.

But hey! Let's talk about the colors! As Tarr usually works in b&w, I was overwhelmed how good he is with colors - I wondered why he chose the b&w format later on? Tarr uses a palette of greens, blues and reds which are often contrasted in very striking ways, often to - and well, this may be cheesy - underline a certain tension in the situation. Camera angles are also used for a similar purpose, and here I once again think about Fassbinder and how he evokes a creepy social universe by tilting the camera or making us look at the character's from a strange perspective.