Netflix Finds: Bela Tarr's THE WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES

Hungarian filmmaker BélaTarr has made something altogether wonderful in The Werckmeister Harmonies, a film in which a lot is going on but still doesn't have a lot of plot, a film which is meant to be watched and listened to and absorbed and yes, probably argued about, but not necessarily enjoyed for the narrative.

I would undersell it to describe it as a two and a half hour music video, but in some ways that's what it is, and what the title might almost make one expect; the work of Baroque era composer and musical theorist Andreas Werckmesiter is alluded to (negatively) but is not present in the soundtrack, replaced by Strauss' Radetzsky March, Bach's Prelude No. 8 in E-flat minor from The Well Tempered Clavier and, most importantly and thoroughly, a gloriously beautiful and haunting score by Hungarian composer Vig Mihaly, in which a simple and repetitive piano motif is amplified, possibly canonically (I'm no music theorist myself) by beautiful string arrangements that alternately meditate and weep and amplify the film's stateliness (if the film grabs you) or glacial slowness (which you'll complain of if it doesn't).

What story there is concerns a tiny village on the Hungarian plain, the kind that seems suspended in a strange 20th century timelessness until the spell is broken toward the end with the brief appearance of a modern helicopter in a vaguely (and slowed down) North by Northwest-ish chase scene. It's winter, or the start of winter, and the mercury has dropped to way below freezing; the season of "nothing to do but drink and fret" has begun. To liven things up of an evening, our sort-of-hero, Valuska János (Lars Rudolph) takes it upon himself to arrange the drunks in the town's only cafe into a living, staggering orrery to explain an upcoming eclipse (which, violating Chekov's gun rules, does not occur in the film except maybe in a very metaphorical sense).

But soon more interesting entertainments are on offer: a traveling circus! Tarr both does and does not partake of the "sinister carnival" motif we see so often in film with this: the circus consists of just two "acts": a taxidermy whale and a nasty non-character called "The Prince", alluded to but never seen, who allegedly has the "power of magnetism" but seems principally to exercise that power in the form of hate speech that has startlingly violent consequences.

All of this unfolds in 39 long and languid shots, sometimes several minutes long, that will either madden or entrance the viewer. The taxidermy whale arrives slowly in a giant corrugated metal crate and we watch its ponderous arrival in real time with János as the light ripples along the crate's surface. János puts one "uncle" to bed and prepares his house for nighttime, then goes out on a newspaper delivery "run" that's really more of a stroll. He pauses with another "uncle" (I think maybe "uncle" is an honorific for your elders in Hungary?) who expounds on his theories that Andreas Werckmeister's tuning theories have distorted the Music of the Spheres (which idea János sort of demonstrated in the cafe) and are why everything has gone wrong in the world. He meets with the theorist's estranged wife (Hanna Shygulla), who insists on János drafting the old man into doing something about the growing disturbance in the town the circus has touched off. A group of cudgel brandishing men slowly march to the facility they will do their best to destroy. Etc.

Really, for me, it's all about watching the light play on Shygulla's beautifully aging features, on the shadows and hollows created in Rudolph's face, and the rhythm of the film's dancelike movements to Vig Mihaly's amazing, amazing score.

Netflix Finds: Erik Eger & Magnus Oliv's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF EVIL

I like a mockumentary almost as much as I like a documentary, especially when it's got lots of layers of complete WTFery. So I'm pretty much exactly the audience for something like Erik Eger & Magnus Oliv's One Hundred Years of Evil, which concerns itself with a (fictitious) researcher and documentary filmmaker's pursuit of proof that Adolf Hitler not only survived World War II but came to America and continued to mastermind evil in his adopted homeland.

The fun starts right in the opening credits, where we keep seeing an improbable yet euphonious name over and over again: Idelfonso Elizade, named as the auteur but not, it turns out, an actual person. But soon we're immersed in stranger things as our researcher character, Skule (quoth my roommate "Dude, I wish I had a name as cool as Skull") starts unearthing secret after secret, his discoveries and interviews intercut with "found footage" in which, for instance, our maybe-Hitler sitteth on the (camera) right hand of Joseph McCarthy almighty, bobbing his head right along with everybody's favorite Red Scare menace as he lectures about the insidious threat of Communism in post-war Amurrka or makes a brief and totally deadpan stage appearance with a troupe of transsexual singers for whom he served as a roadie for a while.

Meanwhile, Skule starts getting harassed by unseen forces eager to keep the truth hidden and starts getting entertainingly paranoid in an almost Blair Witchian fashion. And the hilarity continues. My roommate and I laughed our asses off. You might, too.

If I have a criticism, it is only this: too many of the performances were a little too on the nose, spoiling the illusion that this actually was a documentary. No one ever made the amateur mistakes of looking into the camera, no one ever stumbled or paused in delivering their lines, it was all just a little too perfect, and thus obvious that these were actors playing crazy sources and not just crazy sources. But perhaps that, too, was intentional, a further sending up of the documentary format and its conventions? I'm just not sure.

Netflix Finds: THE DEVIL'S WHORE

The Devil's Whore, retitled The Devil's Mistress for North American release for reasons I can only imagine are marketing-related and pandering to the hissy classes, is watchable enough as costume dramas go -- if you can handle its annoying flaws. These are few, but of the type that bug the hell out of me.

Set during the English Civil War and featuring therefore many fascinating historical characters played by pretty, pretty men in fake beards and hair extensions and photogenically placed prosthetic wens and scars, The Devil's Whore tells the story of the fictional Angelica Fanshawe (Andrea Riseborough). Angelica is gently born but abandoned by her Catholic mother (whom the Virgin Mary tells Mom to go to France and join a nunnery, prompting her tween daughter to conclude that she's not interested in praying to a god who tells mothers to abandon their childrens) and so grows up "wild" in the court of Charles I and at the side of her cousin Harry, who is to inherit her family's estate and whom she is intended to marry. In a tacked-on and unnecessary side plot, she also grows up having visions of the Devil, which visions continue into her adult life and for which she becomes a bit infamous.

Devil visions aside, Angelica is a bit of a Mary Sue, desired by all, uncommonly wise and principled, a crack shot with a pistol, and, most importantly, there to buck up, nag or otherwise manipulate many of the great men of the period (including Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Rainsborough, Freeborn John Lilburne and a character "based on" Edward Sexby) into fulfilling their historical roles. Her flaws are all charming ones, though they do get her first husband killed and earn her an implacable cardboard enemy; her first husband is executed by Charles I to punish him for giving up their great house without a fight (which he did because she wouldn't leave it and wanted bravely to die by his side defending it from the Roundheads) and she gains her enemy (amusingly played by Tim McInnenry of Blackadder fame) when, brought low by widowhood and the withdrawal of Charles I's financial support, she accidentally kills the man who wins the roshambo for the right to feed her pigeon pie and then get it on with her. Defending her virtue, you see. The loser of the roshambo begins to pursue her as a murderess, catches her several times, and gets the worst out of every encounter, even when he thinks he has successfully prosecuted her for murder.

Meanwhile, Angelica finds herself thrust into the stories of Lilburne (played in mulleted glory by Tom Goodman-Hill) and Rainsborough (Michael Fassbender), who are worth Wiki-ing if you don't know who they are (I didn't). Having spent the first act of her life as an ardent supporter of Charles I and the Established Order, she now adopts the Leveller cause* and doesn't bat an eye at the execution of her former patron and king (though she is, in her defense, otherwise occupied at the time). She comes to Lilburne's rescue several times and even smuggles some of his most incendiary pamphleteering to be published while he is in prison. She becomes Rainsborough's girlfriend. On and on and on.

But of course this story is really all about Angelica and Edward Sexby (John Simm, looking great with long hair, a beard, and a big scar across his left eye), a gritty, cynical fighting man who nonetheless falls in love with Angelica (unrequitedly) while serving as a sort of retainer in her first husband's household and proceeds to change his colors to match hers through the rest of the film, becoming first a dedicated Roundhead and Leveller and later, after the wonderfully radical Rainsborough is offed, plots to assassinate Oliver Cromwell when he learns the man whom he's pretty sure sacrificed Rainsborough to his own ambition is about to be made king in all but name.

Could any of this have happened without Angelica? Well, it did, of course. And if that kind of thing bothers you, then avoid this miniseries completely. But if all you're looking for is some harmless historical romance, I suppose you could do worse. It did win a few awards, so there's that...

Me, I would have liked it a lot better if there were more battle and less lovey dovey, but that's just me.

*The Levellers being more or less the Occupy Wall Street movement of their day, but more focused and goal-oriented than their modern counterparts.