Béla Tarr’s Werkmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister Harmóniák) is, like so many of Tarr’s other films, an aesthetic and philosophical challenge. A master of the long take, Tarr composed the nearly two-and-a-half-hour film in a series of 39 sequence shots, which means that much of the film unfolds in real time (Tarr is one of the preeminent purveyors of so-called “slow cinema,” which some find intoxicating and others find excruciating). The dominance of long takes and real time emphasizes a sense of realism even if we recognize that Tarr and his co-screenwriter László Krasznahorkai are working in the broad parameters of parable and allegory. Everything is both concrete and symbolic, literal and figurative, which means that the film itself will mean different things to different viewers.

Given that the film was made in Tarr’s native Hungary at the turn of the 21st century, it is hard not to see the unnamed village in which it takes place as a stand-in for Hungary itself, which had suffered for decades under Soviet oppression and was then in a state of political instability, with each election cycle bringing in a new government that promised (and often failed) to ease the post-communist economic depression. The film’s wintry sense of desolation, which the austere black-and-white cinematography emphasizes with great power, hangs heavy over the oddball story, which centers on János Valuska (Lars Rudolph), a newspaper-delivery man who finds himself at the center of growing turmoil when a travelling circus of sorts arrives late one night in his small village. The “circus” is really just a huge trailer that is parked in the middle of the square, inside of which is an enormous taxidermized whale. Viewers have to go inside the dark confines of the trailer to view the whale, which means that the extraordinary animal, already reduced to the humiliation of taxidermy, is further reduced by proximity and darkness. The circus also promises a performance by an unnamed man known only as the Prince, but he remains unseen.

Meanwhile, various political tensions are growing in the village, some of which are being inflamed by Tünde (Hanna Schygulla), the estranged wife of György Eszter (Peter Fitz), a musicologist with whom János is close friends. (The film’s esoteric title derives from György’s contention that the musical scale defined by the 17th-century German composer Andreas Werckmeister, which is the basis of virtually all subsequent Western musical forms, is flawed and must be revised—a concept that I confess I do not understand at all.) János also interacts with Uncle Lajos, György’s’s cobbler brother who, like many workers in the village, is struggling to survive. Corruption abounds, especially in the figure of the drunken police chief (Péter Dobai), and the political tensions eventually erupt as they usually do. The film’s most memorable and disturbing sequence finds the irate villages, armed with various blunt weapons, descending on a hospital and dragging the sick patients out of bed to beat them for no other reason than to punish their helplessness. When János later reads the diary of a rioter, the rioter confesses that he had no idea what he was so angry about, which suggests that much political violence has little to do with politics except as a pretense for the exercise of brute force for its own sake. Sadly, it is the figure of a pathetic, naked old man, his skin hanging off his frame, that causes the violent crowd to disperse.

It is a haunting image, no doubt, and one that informs the rest of Werckmeister Harmonies, which eventually returns us to that great, stuffed whale, now rendered sad and rotting in a growing fog that feels like the film itself consuming us in its mix of impenetrable meaning and undeniable emotional heft. What Tarr has achieved here borders on the sublime, and I cannot imagine that the film’s full effectiveness resides in its preliminary viewing.

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