I'm probably the only person on the board who's seen this flick, maybe the only person in the country hah. But wow, what a powerful film. It inspired me to read the book which is hands down the HARDEST book I've ever read. The author has a habit of using very, very, verrrry long sentences, covering & uncovering multitudes of thoughts before there's a period. Line breaks? Good luck. There's probably 10 line breaks in the whole book. The opening sentence is about 150 words long and spans 2 1/2 pages.

Anyway, on the off chance that some obscure film/book wanderer stops by here (honestly I would estimate only around a dozen native English speakers in the entire world have seen this movie & read the book), here's where we can sound off.

The film only covers the middle part of the book. That's fair because to cover the whole book would be another 7+ hr epic like Tarr's Satantango which he did earlier. But what's funny is when you take the middle part out of context with the front & the end, it has a much different flavor. The book revolves obliquely around a horrific rape/murder which the movie doesn't show. This crime is really the fulcrum of what sends Janos over the edge (something which is very unclear in the film), and the end of the book further explains and details Janos's fate, as well as the fate of the town and presumably the world.

In a nutshell, until I read the book I had it all wrong. Even though I'd watched the movie 3 or 4 times, it's impossible to grasp the extent of the story without the book's beginning & ending. But at the same time that makes the movie even more interesting. Taken as a standalone piece, I think it has a completely different interpretation. Tarr's movie does go much deeper into the significance of the eclipse & the Werckmeister tunings, and those 2 elements are really the highlight of the piece for me. I wonder what the writer Krasznahorkai thought of Tarr's interpretation.