Maz Murdoch (asda-man) I wasn't Bela Tarr's biggest fan after viewing The Turin Horse. A film which gathered rave reviews from the art-house crowd, about two of the most boring characters in the universe going about their boring daily business for a very boring week indeed. It made my life look like a thrill a minute! Although The Turin Horse was beautifully shot and magnificently directed, it had absolutely nothing in the way of characters or plot, which in my opinion are two of the most important things to engage an audience. However, I was willing to give Bela another chance. Werckmeister Harmonies was gaining some unbelievable reviews. People were saying that it changed their lives, it moved them to tears and that it was one of the most perfect films they'd ever seen. I put away my Turin Horse prejudices and was actually really looking forward to seeing it! Unfortunately, what I got was more of the same thing.Read any rave review for Werckmeister Harmonies and you won't see anyone commenting on the narrative or plot, they'll instead be commenting on the imagery and score, both of which are admittedly fabulous. I was drawn in from the opening 15 minutes which showed off some incredible camera-work with a 10 minute cut-free sequence explaining the universe with various German drunks. It must've been painstakingly rehearsed and taken an unholy amount of takes with the camera and actors moving around with great precision. I couldn't help but really appreciate this stark opening. And then we had the near-perfect shot of Janos walking down the dark street with a beautifully haunting score playing over it. I was swept in, buckled in and ready for the ride!However, just like The Turin Horse things quickly began to get tedious. The main problem is the characters. They're not exactly infused with life are they? The only thing interesting about the protagonist is his amusing name, Janos. None of the characters have any personality and they don't develop which makes it very difficult to engage with the story. I think it must be a Hungarian thing though, because every Hungarian film I've seen has featured stupidly boring characters. Hungary definitely isn't a place I'd want to visit or make a film about.The other big problem with Werckmeister is that it's quite simply, very boring. I love a long take as much as the next fat person but most of these long takes feel long for the sake of it. I don't need to see people walking for 5 minutes. You may say that it creates atmosphere and if you'd be right, but I'm not particularly keen on an atmosphere of boredom. Werckmeister Harmonies has barely enough plot to fill an 80 minute film, yet Bela decides to stretch it out to two and a half hours. Thank god he was never approached to adapt The Lord of the Rings!Much of the narrative is meandering around very dull characters. At one point Janos' aunty comes with her knickers in a twist about her ex-husband. The whole sequence is very dull and uninteresting, yet it takes up about 40 minutes of the film and adds nothing. At lot of people point towards a political allegory, which personally doesn't interest me at all, however Bela has even said in interviews that he had no political allegory in mind and was just shooting a story about a man meeting a whale. There could've been an interesting story if the most interesting characters weren't skimmed over. The Prince for example seemed like a fascinating fellow, but only his shadow is shown once! Obviously Bela didn't want to give his viewers a heart attack with too much excitement.Werckmeister Harmonies isn't all bad though. Just like The Turin Horse it is beautifully made, with some shots being nothing short of stunning. I must admit that the hospital sequence was also brilliant, even if the reasons behind the characters doing it are a little bemusing. The two scores that feature in the film are also incredible and actually quite moving. I'm not one of these people who cry at Mozart or anything, but I did find the music in this very powerful and it elevated some scenes (especially the hospital scene) wonderfully. For some strange reason I was almost moved to tears at the final scene! Now, I don't know if that was because I was so happy that my ordeal was over, or if the music was so haunting.I don't judge anyone for liking this film. It is undeniably beautiful to look at and directed with mesmerising precision and sometimes this is enough for people! Some of my favourite films put atmosphere first and characters/plot second such as: Eraserhead and more recently, Under the Skin. However, these films are interesting enough to engage me. Nothing about Werckmeister Harmonies interested me so I was never engaged or felt involved with what I was watching. I watched it in complete darkness and on a proper screen too to try and soak up the atmosphere, but I just couldn't feel it. Werckmeister Harmonies disappointed me massively and I've decided to give up on Bela Tarr. I almost fall asleep just thinking about his seven hour magnum-opus, Satantango! Read more strange reviews at: www.asdaman.wordpress.com

aklcraigc The movie starts well enough, establishing a stark, gloomy atmosphere. We see the local postman Janos doing various things, in the process introducing us to some of the other characters in the story. Basically the story from here, in a nutshell, is that a sideshow consisting of a stuffed whale and a character known as 'the prince' (who we never see directly) arrives in the town square. The townsfolk start to gather in the square, becoming progressively more agitated as the film progresses, finally they go on some type of rampage, sacking the local hospital (it is implied that this is somehow at the behest of 'the prince'). It seems then the army moves in to round up the locals, and for some reason not fully explained, Janos is deposited in the local asylum. There are various small subplots which go nowhere (some type of local power play with Janos' relatives and some kind of musical analogy for the plot seems to be floated). This is more than enough for your average art film to hang its hat on, the problem more comes in the quality of ideas over the length of the movie. One can detect the influences of various directors, the most obvious being Tarkovsky and the long takes; at the start of the movie these long takes are full of movement and interest; however, as we progress, the motif becomes overused and dull. In the end, it seems the long takes of people walking take on an almost comic effect, with the director dragging it on just long enough to make you squirm before introducing a new element.One never really develops any empathy with any of the characters, most are only hastily drawn eastern European clichés, the main character starts to chew the scenery a little at the end, the actor seems somewhat unsure how Janos' mental state is meant to progress. Overall, it's as if the director spends a lot of time creating an interesting setting, then isn't quite sure what to do with it over the duration of the film. Werckmeister Harmonies is by no means a bad film, it just doesn't scale to the heights it so obviously aspires to.

Jose Cruz This is a different kind of film. Some say that it is more like Tarkovsky in that the plot is not the driving force of the film, which is correct. Though, I would rather watch Stalker (I rated it 10/10) or The Mirror (rated it 10/10) any day over this black and white film.I don't know why make a black and white film in the year 2000? There is no artistic value in depriving a visual media such as film from color. In the same way that painting is generally not done in black and white, film shouldn't be generally done in black and white: color improves the expressiveness. I liked Tarkovsky's employment of black and white and color in different sections of the film, but make a film of over 2 hours of black and white in the year 2000? Please, artistic pretension doesn't equal artistic achievement.Another problem I had with the film were the slightly overlong takes of 3-4 minutes. I like slower paced films, such as Ozu's, but this is simply too much for me.Overall, the film was rewarding but costly and thus represents a work of serious art that deserves respect but I didn't find is the greatest film ever made.

rooprect "Werckmeister Harmonies" is one of the most challenging films, with the greatest payoff, of any movie I've ever seen. A visually stunning adaptation of László Krasznahorkai's novel "The Melancholy of Resistance", this film tells the story of a sleepy Hungarian village over the course of about a day and a half when the circus rolls into town. With the circus come two main attractions: the body of a giant whale, and a 25-lb circus freak known only as "The Prince". These two attractions have profound, shocking effects on our hero Janos (excellently played by the boyish Lars Rudolph) and the inhabitants of the entire village, if not the entire country.The story presents a powerful allegory, every bit as biting and accusatory as Plato's "Allegory of the Cave", exposing the nature of human folly and the reason why society does, did, and always shall suck. I've found that the people who most enjoy this film are those who are moderately to extremely cynical; it shows us a very dark, nihilistic, nightmarish world similar to what we've seen in the classics "Brazil", Orson Welles' "The Trial" and basically every Herzog film ever made.But what makes this dark film enjoyable to watch is that doesn't just show us that humanity is flawed; it seeks to explain *why* humanity is flawed.I'll warn you up front, this is a very slow moving film with seemingly pointless, indulgent scenes of people silently walking down the street, eating a can of soup, or walking down the street in the opposite direction. Something to bear in mind is, just like in the epic "2001: A Space Odyssey" which has scenes of, say, an astronaut running on a giant hamster wheel for a painfully long time, these scenes are there to convey the monotony of existence. Even beyond that, these scenes are supposed to convey the comfort humans feel with tedious & ritualistic behavior. Order vs. chaos.The second thing that might help is the meaning of the title "Werckmeister Harmonies" which is the key to understanding the film's message. It's explained in a scene near the beginning, but I'll try to explain it in simpler terms here. In western music, we have a particular tuning system for all instruments. This system was developed by Andreas Werckmeister around the year 1700, and centuries later we still use it. The problem is, in a nutshell, it's wrong. Werckmeister's "well tempered" tuning is a compromise that allows instruments to sound good in a variety of keys, but it sacrifices the purity of sounding perfect in any 1 particular key. Pure, "natural" instruments such as the recorder flute sound great but they are limited to 1 key, 7 notes per octave. When western music took on complex instruments like the piano & guitar which play in every key, 12 notes per octave, a certain degree of fudging had to be made in their tuning. This is because in the natural world, the diverse frequencies of music don't add up to neatly repeating 12- note octaves as we want (for some reason we lose about 1/5 of a note every octave). Thus the music we know today, while not necessarily being unpleasant, is not as pure & simple as true "naturally tuned" instruments of yesteryear.How does this relate to the movie? The movie is about humans' need to quantify the unquantifiable, our need to create artificial order that suits us, even though it may be an aberration of nature. If you grasp this idea, along with the metaphor of the Werckmeister tuning, as well as the creative story that unfolds in the film, all augmented with intelligent cinematography, you will adore this film.Congratulations, you have successfully read through the driest & most boring IMDb review I have ever written. I have no doubt that you will enjoy solving the philosophical puzzle of the film "Werckmeister Harmonies".Similar, challenging films include: "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1969), "Aguirre the Wrath of God" (1972), or the more recent Coen brothers' philosophical "A Serious Man", or the brain-blasting Kaufman dark comedy/mindbender "Synecdoche, NY" (2008).