Sátántangó

My wife is going to be going on a prolonged trip pretty soon, so I'll be home alone with my kid.

I'm going to put him to bed, and my goal while she's out of town is to watch the whole of Satan Tango.

which I haven't watched but bought on Blu-ray anyway because that's the only way I'm going to hold myself to seeing that film.

How long is it again? Seven and a half hours.

I mean, if people can

binge a whole season of fucking Stranger Things in a night, I think you can do it over a week.

Yeah, but Satan Tango is notoriously bleak, so can I do that for seven and a half hours? You can.

I can.

Mike, which director is known for the slow cinema masterpiece Shata Tango? Wow, okay.

So it is spelled out Satan Tango.

S-A-T-A-N-G-O.

And does translate to Satan's tango or tango with Satan.

three hours

was insane.

My, like the way I can, the way I think about long movies has shifted dramatically because of this podcast.

Yeah.

This is like four hours is nothing now.

I've enjoyed many of his films.

And we finally sat down over three nights and watched his seven-plus-hour Satan Tango, which is beloved by all of anybody who is serious about film.

And I must say...

We found it a little slow.

But there are two or three Tars that I just, I look at them and I say, wow, this is, you know, this is a titan of cinema.

It's slow cinema, but I understand the genius at work here.

Whereas I didn't, I mean, you know, there are obviously glimmers of greatness in Satan Tango, but it...

It didn't live up to its reputation, at least for me.

Yeah.

So in college and undergrad, I took a French film class.

So we went through all like the classics, especially like the film noir movement.

And so this was definitely one of them by Clouseau.

And, you know, we were challenged to watch all of these films really in French, entirely in French, no subtitles at all, so that we can get a little bit more adjusted to the language, to picking up, you know, like what we were listening to, to see if we can really register, you know, processing French, listening to French, responding in French.

And so this was one of the films, you know, my history with 50s, 40s films is kind of, you know, I'm not too fond.

I tend to feel like it's slow.

It's drawn on.

I mean, he died earlier this year and he'd already given up directing.

He made one film called Satan Tango, which is nine hours long.

Right.

And it's very slow.

film director Béla Tarr.

Because of him, because he wanted to make a film after this Satan Tango book, I had to read again the book.

And I experienced this is not the book that I wanted to write.

I have to make something.

He always writes about the subject, kind of big subjects also, things that you can relate to as a reader, although the protagonists may be very far from your own life.

So I don't think he's correcting himself in that sense when it comes to storytelling or the narrative part of his books, perhaps when it comes to language.

But he's constantly developing, I would say, as a writer, which is also very fascinating since he started off with Satan Tango, which is a very complex novel from many points of views.

Maybe he's working towards an even simpler style today.

I want to do this with like 1982 or like 1997, like the old, older years,

depending on how we feel about our next episode, which is Satan Tango from 1994.

Yeah.

We might do a 1994 based episode.

for

Showa? What

the fuck? For Satan Tango, regardless of what we talk about, we gotta go at least a full hour.

We gotta make that hour mark.