Damnation

Kárhozat
a film by Béla Tarr

In a small Hungarian town lives Karrer, a listless and brooding man who has almost completely withdrawn from the world, but for an obsession with a singer in the bar he frequents. The film opens on to a view of a desolate, industrialised landscape. Overhead, giant buckets suspended from an aerial cableway journey endlessly back and forth, their cyclic movement and repetitive, mechanical sound appear to be the only signs of human activity. The camera draws slowly back revealing Karrer sitting at his window, motionless and watching. A solitary man whose life is almost completely eroded by hopelessness except for his love and desire for a beautiful, haunting singer at the Titanik Bar, a nightclub in this small, drab coal-mining town. The girl is doing her best to end their relationship, and her husband warns him to stay away from his wife. But Karrer's very existence clings to the hope that she will leave her husband for him, and yet he seems incapable of doing anything to make this, or anything else in his life, happen.

Karrer is then offered a smuggling job by Willarsky, the shady owner of a local bar, but he decides instead to offer it to Sebestyén, the girl's husband, who has built up a substantial debt and is in danger of being imprisoned for it. Sebestyén's acceptance means that Karrer and the girl can spend a few days alone together. The girl too is desperate for change in her life and wants to leave for the city to become a famous singer. Certainly she doesn't see Karrer's advances as an answer to her dreams, but eventually she agrees to sleep with him during the husband's absence. A bitter Karrer then decides he will turn in to the authorities her husband when he returns from his smuggling job, leaving her alone and thus making him now the logical option. By the end of the story, the lives of the characters will be as broken and desolate as the crumbling town in which they live. Yet, as they wander aimlessly about in a purgatory from which there is no escape, we see that their hopelessness only really comes from inside the individual.

The slowly gliding camera seems almost to have an agenda of its own, whilst the gritty, high contrast, deep-shadows noir imagery adds to the growing sensation of unease. This, the first film in which Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr fully realised his mesmerising and apocalyptic world view is an immaculately photographed and composed study of eternal conflict, the centuries-old struggle between barbarism and civilisation. It was his first collaboration with novelist and fellow countryman László Krasznahorkai and the second film on which he worked with Hungarian musician and composer Mihály Víg.