Werckmeister Harmóniák (Béla Tarr, 2000)

The term arthouse is usually misapplied to any drama with subtitles, but the work of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr can't avoid the label. With Werckmeister Harmonies, the audience may be relieved to be spared the 7-hour running length of his most excessive experiments, but this is still a filmmaker who'll declare that narrative is not his central concern.
So, there are shots of men marching that last minutes upon minutes. The pace is so glacial that the effect is of thematic movements across history rather than events in the stories of individuals, and in this particular case, once you've submitted to the design, the approach is rather synergistic with the theme. The setting may seem at first to be a particular Hungarian town in the middle of a specific historical turmoil, so you look for identifiers until the realisation comes that it is at once meant to be no single place or time and also potentially everywhere and everywhen, as allegory after allegory washes over in slow waves.
Tarr can certainly be criticised for heavy-handedness: it would not be a debasement of his message to vary the method from time to time, and would indeed add something through the creation of contrast. Nevertheless, it seems churlish to harp on about that failing, when parts are touched that few films reach. Tarr has set out to make the viewer consider the nature of revolution and counter-revolution, and individual conviction and dishonesty, from a new perspective and should be commended for the effort, if not always the execution.

7/10