Sátántangó (1994)

The film famously opens with a 7-minute shot of cows.  They emerge from a barn, apparently unattended, and the camera slowly travels with them as they walk to the left.  As the camera moves, it comes across some dilapidated, abandoned buildings.  The neutral, simple image of animals minding their own business is eclipsed by the paranoia and discomfort that come from seeing ruined signs of human life.  These feelings are constant throughout the film's 450 minutes, even in its more humorous moments.  

The film takes place mainly on a remote, failed collective farm village in Hungary.  The characters have little to do in their daily lives besides take long walks in the mud through an eternal rain.  Each of the characters is, at best, a thoroughly mediocre person.  They are irrational, callous, and deceitful.  Even their dreams are unpleasant.  The one character who stands out is the shady and ambitious Irimiás, who expresses thorough disdain for everyone else's submission to their fates.  This shows in their reactions when they hear Irimiás is coming to town: they are largely convinced he has bad intentions for them, but equally convinced that they won't be able to do anything about it. 

Irimiás has plans for the villagers, but we never learn exactly what they are.  The villagers are, in fact, arguably better off at the end of the film than at the beginning.  But Irimiás's true intentions are left open-ended, and whatever they may be in the end, the villagers won't have much say in how it affects them.  They are comparable to the villagers of the Lucania region in Francesco Rosi's adaptation of Christ Stopped at Eboli, consigned to being other people's political bargaining chips.  What matters in Sátántangó isn't what Irimiás is planning, but the fact that the villagers are basically at his mercy.  But the villagers in that story at least would have preferred to have agency of their own, while that's hardly obvious in Sátántangó.  Irimiás has money and charisma, and by the time he arrives at in town, their greed and neglect has given him all the dirt he needs to threaten them into obedience.  

The middle section of the film focuses on tragic events involving Estike, a young girl who is manipulated by her brother and ignored by her mother.  She goes on to brutally mistreat her cat.  The film puts chronology aside here: later and earlier parts of the film depict the same stretch of time as this middle section, but from different character's perspectives.  It drives home that what happens to her is beneath the notice of the other characters, the degree to which they shut out the world.  It's what ultimately comes to derail their lives once Irimiás arrives.  Again, the film has humorous moments, but this section is decidedly grim.

In addition to Estike's cat and the cows in the opening shot, there are a few other animals the film briefly turns its attention to.  The film's omniscient narrator explains the lives of the spiders living in the local tavern.  Late in the film, there's an extended shot in which the camera pushes in on an owl visiting a ruined manor at night.  Besides the cat, who is victimized by a human, the presence of animals provides some small relief from the discomfort generated by the other elements of the film.  Like the cows, they're neutral, and they seem to have less trouble belonging wherever they are than the human characters do.

For humans in Sátántangó, belonging anywhere in the world is a paradox.  The camera follows people shambling through the mud and rain for minutes on end.  Despite the film's immense length, not much more happens in it than happens in a normal film.  It's just that we witness much more of the slogs in between.  We often see Irimiás in more urban settings, but the rain is just as constant.  In one scene at a diner, the camera is placed just right for us to see how filthy the floors get.  In one scene, the villagers dance at the local tavern.  It seems all right at first, but the film hangs on it for an unbelievably long time, showing them dance to the same looping tune without saying a single word to each other.  After a while, it becomes exhausting.  Another while after that, it becomes disturbing.  The presence of other people demands suspicion: if they're like Irimiás we suspect malice, and if they're like the villagers we suspect unreliability.  And we produce waste, which we see in the form of the film's many abandoned buildings and in the trash that constantly blows along the roads Irimiás walks.  

While these paradoxes are, to an extent, universal, not everyone experiences them as keenly as the characters in Sátántangó.  The existential problems in this film are especially important to these characters as a matter of who they are, where they live in space and history.  In the end, all the villagers are like Estike, falling beneath the notice of others.  They the ones who simply experience transitions of power, usually for the worse, and have little say in how it turns out.