Damnation (1988)

I consider Béla Tarr as one of the most important contemporary film-makers (I'm sad he has stopped making movies), but Damnation is not his best film. It's worth a look, though. It features Tarr's typical slow-panning long takes, deadpan lines (people speak rarely and when they do they mutter some apocalyptic aphorism) and elusive events. And yeah, the music would be a good competitor in Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World. Maddin's film was not sad, but Tarr's is, and the problem is perhaps that it eventually flounders on the border of miserabilism.

The characters and the way they speak and move are extremely stylized, wooden even - but in contrast with other movies by Tarr, this stylized acting doesn't take off, it doesn't take me anywhere: I am crammed within a crumbling, depressive world. Why is it so miserable? Why is even dancing a form of death-like, or somnambulistic ritual? When I have been watching other movies by Tarr - other glacial-paced, depressing movies, these questions haven't occurred to me; then, I have been in the grips of the movie, not questioning its universe.

There's a woman who predict the apocalypse, there's a sordid proposal to take part in criminal activities and there's a doomed erotic affair between an alcoholic guy and a nightclub singer. Misery, alienation and betrayal. Everything spirals downward. Or no, it doesn't spiral anywhere, we're already there. If this film wasn't made by Tarr, it would have been quite unwatchable - I thought several times about which sides of Roy Andersson's films I don't like (a sort of pessimism that is revered as a prophetic view of life), and how these sides all seemed to be present in Damnation. But as this IS, thankfully, a Béla Tarr film there is plenty to enjoy, most of all, of course, the striking way Tarr lets the camera roam and our attention follows this hypnotic journey into a world that mostly contains very, very little: the texture of a wall, rain, a rattling and clanking mining conveyor belt, a night-club singer crooning a song that evokes the end of the world. Damnation isn't a boring film; but even though it is often stunning, the film goes off [creeps off] into a direction I am not at all sure about.

Fun fact: one of the bars to which the main character goes boozing is called Titanik. What a Kaurismäkian name, and the general feel of the bar is also totally within Kaurismäki's cinematic imagination.