Satantango

Already famous as the inspiration for the filmmaker Béla Tarr’s six-hour masterpiece, Satantango est la preuve que "le diable a tous les bons moments."

L'histoire de Satantango, qui se déroule sur quelques jours de pluie incessante, se concentre sur la douzaine d'habitants restants d'un hameau isolé et anonyme : des ratés coincés au milieu de nulle part.

Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai’s meat. “At the center of Satantango,” George Szirtes has said, “is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk. . . . Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and the tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.”

“You know,” Mrs. Schmidt, a pivotal character, tipsily confides, “dance is my one weakness.”