Satantango
Facets Video, $79.95
My friend Rachel has me pretty much convinced that Hungarian film director Béla Tarr is the devil. I leave it to hardcore theorists to fix whether he's truly the devil, a devil, or just demonic, but check this out: Exhibit A is the 7½-minute opening shot of the 7½-hour-long Satantango. Herded neither by dog nor man and distracted only by their bored-looking (but exquisitely composed) attempts at copulation, a herd of cattle fully enters and exits a frame that smoothly, perfectly tracks with them past a series of farmhouses, as their movements repeatedly complicate and complete a composition that effortlessly evolves over a couple dozen feet of dolly track. The camera is rigidly controlled, and the cows are ... cows. Dimly persuadable, sure, but somehow also more perfect here than the camera, in a shot that would be difficult enough with people. Did I mention the thing about 7½ minutes and 7½ hours? Plus I heard this was take 1. The devil.
Speak of him long enough, and he arrives from Facets. Worshipped and talked up by a cult of international festivalgoers since its premiere in 1994, Satantango's mythic status owes partly to diabolical genius, partly to influence on the work of Gus Van Sant (particularly Elephant), and, let's admit, partly to bragging rights. You not only make it through but actually enjoy nearly eight hours of rainy, black-and-white bleakness about the failure of a communal farm at a festival in, say, Greece (as I did), and you've earned significant envy in some quarters. The bonus is that it's way too big and way too Hungarian to play any local theatre soon, so your friends can't return glumly from the Arbor to tell you it sucks.
Perhaps there's an interesting experiment in cinephilia to be observed with a long-form legend finally set upon a market where it's not unusual to hole up for a weekend with 14-odd hours of The Wire. Not to say that any Béla Tarr movie remotely plays like HBO, but whatever Tarr's protestations to the contrary, I'll submit that he's actually a hell of a storyteller and far more accessible than his rep would suggest, with the most graceful and straightforward control of nonlinear chronology going. Patience and attention to detail can be learned anywhere, perhaps in most places better than they're covered in film schools. And they're not handed out with film-festival badges, but they're more than amply rewarded by Satantango. Think of those cows, imagine what he can do with seven hours following people, and allow me to advocate that you make him a devil you know. – Spencer Parsons
The Inglorious Bastards: 3 Disc Explosive Edition
Severin Films, $29.95
Marry the gut-level contradictions found in Samuel Fuller's movies, the action poetry of Sam Peckinpah's work, and the verve and intensity of the exclusively male combat units seen in the war films of any number of American filmmakers from Robert Aldrich to Darryl Zanuck, and you'll get a sense of what you're in for when you strap on the newly released disc of Italian director Enzo Castellari's The Inglorious Bastards. This English-language war film was made in Italy in 1978 and is set in Nazi-occupied France in 1944. At the outset, a paddy wagon of American soldiers who are being driven to the stockade to await court-martial comes under German attack while en route. Five prisoners survive the assault, and with nothing but certain recapture if they return to the American base, they decide to push on through enemy territory to neutral Switzerland. On the run from the Germans and the Allies, this band of bastards fights its way forward with cunning, daring, instinct, and, ultimately, altruism, once they inadvertently land in the midst of a precarious covert operation.
It's this nugget of a plot setup that is surely what Quentin Tarantino will borrow when he makes his own World War II movie titled Inglorious Bastards. While Castellari's movie, which is receiving its first real U.S. release with this DVD, stands on its own as a terrific war film, it's naturally receiving heightened interest because of Tarantino's interest. Tarantino has never made any secret of his love for "men on a mission" movies, and The Inglorious Bastards is a glorious example of the form.
Severin Films' three-disc package showcases a pristine print. The film's action sequences are truly impressive, even more so when you see stars Bo Svenson, Fred Williamson, and some of the others performing their own stunts. On disc one, extras include Castellari's commentary track and a conversation between Tarantino and Castellari that was recorded just a few weeks ago, as Tarantino was finishing his own script. While natural-seeming (Tarantino's markedly disheveled look almost denies the presence of a camera), the talk ultimately reveals more about Tarantino than Castellari. The documentary on disc two, Train Kept a-Rollin' by Federico Caddeo, features interviews with Castellari, Williamson, Svenson, special-effects artist Gino de Rossi (nicknamed Bombardoni), and others and offers the most significant insights into the film. Another locations featurette contributes little extra value, and, on the whole, the extras become rather repetitive when viewed as a set. The third disc is a soundtrack CD. – Marjorie Baumgarten
Vampyr
Criterion Collection, $39.95
Early soundies, besides stoning many blackbirds with a single title – French, German, and English versions of the same film were often shot simultaneously – inhabit a netherworld custom-made for the crypt. In the velvet-lined case of Great Dane Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889-1968), first intertitles and then long passages from a book play a leading role in the silent scream of 1932's Vampyr, filmed about the same time as Dracula but released the following year. Fluttering light, milky screens, and voyeuristic camerawork track the film like nine out of Dreyer's 14 total titles – sans sound – but the voices out of the abyss are all too audible. Here, when anyone speaks (German – the English version is lost, and the French master helped piece together this composite), their words often erupt from the audio track in barked challenge, as if talkies were still a novelty to test. Predictably, to a lesser degree than Dreyer's monumental, silent The Passion of Joan of Arc, this stakeout visualizes its horror rather than wags tongues ripe for cutting. Vampyr's titular witch, another of Dreyer's nonactors, takes her place in the mausoleum of cinematic bloodsuckers, though don't put her ashes next to Nosferatu, because as Tony Raynes' illuminating commentary track details, Dreyer was no fan of F.W. Murnau's genre progenitor. Funny, then, that Vampyr flashes German expressionism with iconic determination. The heart-stopping coffin scene belongs on the uppermost shelf of filmdom's nightmare vault. In fact, the whole tale of Allan Gray, "preoccupied with superstitions of centuries past," and his arrival at the roadside inn of his deepest dreams, falls together both as disorienting as the director/original screenplaywright intended and, by the final scene, as effective. A 30-minute documentary from 1966 captures Dreyer meeting French Diabolique Henri-Georges Clouzot, while a 23-minute radio-cast of the Copenhagen-born filmmaker delivering a paper in English ("Art is not reproduction but subjective choice") proves as methodical as his filmography. Dreyer's screen story comes bound with Vampyr's unholy book of secrets as well. "Here the silence of death prevails," he wrote. That whimpering sound is you. – Raoul Hernandez
André Téchiné
Lions Gate, $34.98
Though little-known here in the States, the biography of André Téchiné reads like the impossibly perfect résumé of a French film director in the second half of the 20th century. He began writing articles for the legendary Cahiers du Cinema, spiritual home of the French New Wave, at age 21. (His first review? Cahiers alumni François Truffaut's The Soft Skin. So you know he chose his words carefully.) He lived through the revolutionary May of 1968 in Paris; he screened his first film, Paulina S'en Va, the following year at the Venice Film Festival; and he's worked with just about every famous French actor one could name, including Gerard Depardieu, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Binoche, and – his muse – Catherine Deneuve. Now Lions Gate Films is making its pitch for greater American appreciation of this Gallic hero by releasing four of his best movies in one package – though the fact that it's making that pitch without DVD extras is almost unforgivable. Hotel America, from 1981, explores the emotional consequences of a doomed love affair between a successful middle-aged woman (played by Deneuve) and an emotionally unstable and jealous man (Patrick Dewaere). Shot a decade later, I Don't Kiss finds Téchiné's realist aesthetic in full bloom, as he tells the melancholic story of a naive young actor (Manuel Blanc, in a César Award-winning performance) who finds nothing but heartache when he moves to Paris. With the release of Bergman-esque My Favorite Season in 1993, Téchiné established himself as one of Europe's most able chroniclers of modern domestic life, leading Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil, as estranged brother and sister, through a minefield of bitterness and disappointment after their mother takes ill. Masterpiece Wild Reeds closes the set, bringing to life slowly and subtly the coming-of-age dramas of four teens living in Provence in 1962. Set against the backdrop of the Algerian War for Independence, this César-winning drama is a compelling, beautifully acted look at the dovetailing of political and sexual passions in the lives of young people straining for meaning ... even as Téchiné strains believability to conjure his film's Jules and Jim-like ending. – Josh Rosenblatt
