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Bela Tarr’s The Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmóniák) is difficult to define. It accomplishes what most "art" films fail to do-create a lasting work of art (!) that is at once utterly mystifying and infinitely fascinating. Carl Dreyer once said that style should be invisible, as it is simply the director’s way of imposing himself upon the storytelling. Tarr masterfully, yet subtly, handles this role through long takes and dreamy visuals that wryly envelop the viewer in a centrifuge of confusion. It’s a stunning film.

The plot concerns a young postman (The Princess and the Warrior’s Lars Rudolph) in a small Hungarian town where a circus of sorts-bringing with them a giant whale-have arrived. Tensions and personalities fluctuate with the arrival of this freakish monstrosity.

And that’s about it. The rest of the film is surreal, terrifying, and ultimately unforgettable. Shot in black and white, Tarr lets his camera sit for takes that often last over ten minutes. One early scene shows a dark alley for a few minutes. Staring at the screen, the viewer begins to search for meaning once the strange angle settles in. The blacks begin to overtake the whites, manipulating the same image into one radically different-an alley becomes a building, a village-before a distant rumbling enters over the horizon. It’s a large trailer carrying the whale, and traveling at a similar speed. Five minutes later, it crosses in front of the camera, its metal ribbing gliding across the screen like a steel ocean.

Whether or not Tarr has a point in such sequences is insignificant. The different paintings the film presents create individual feelings that weave together into a complex, affecting tapestry. The film appears to essentially be about idolatry, but it touches heavily on the bizarre behavior of nature and life itself. The Werckmeister Harmonies are revealed in the film to be the set of notes that are close to the tonal scale closest to nature. In short, it’s the naïve search for perfection in life.

As Tarr’s camera floats around a town square or through a hospital as an angry, possessed mob destroys it, Mihaly Vig’s absolutely breathtaking score haunts in the background. It’s certainly showy and repetitious, but Vig’s music is pitch-perfect. It serves as the films own Werckmeister harmony, perfectly complementing the search for meaning that the film embodies.

Like the whale at the center of the story, the movie is a large, confounding, beautiful piece of cinema. It is also awesomely powerful, as demonstrated in the horrifying mob scene in the hospital where the tension builds to such intensity that the image of an eighty-year-old man standing stark naked becomes the pinnacle of the film. It is so sad, so pathetic, and so heart-wrenchingly beautiful that the mob comes to end their tirade. We, as viewers, are also moved-and, like the mob, we don’t know why.

Tarr, a renowned Hungarian director (and director of the seven-hour Satantango), spent years on this film only to have its initial English-language print destroyed after Cannes. Thankfully, Menemsha Entertainment has secured a print that has been making rounds in art houses and festivals around the country. A film like this is open to infinite interpretations, as it should be, and is definitely not a film for everyone. It is slow, long (nearly two and a half hours), and there is virtually no concrete truth or ending anywhere in the film-except perhaps that life is chaos and beauty is infinite.

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