Playroom (9): Satantango

Rain, before anyone thinks to name it. The screen turns the colour of churned soil and abandoned tins. Cattle drift through the opening minutes with the deliberation of clockwork that has forgotten there was once a design behind its movement. Wind presses its breath against panes and doors, repeating a message that no one in the settlement can translate. A scatter of buildings keeps company with rutted tracks that used to be roads and with fields that no longer recall labour as anything but gossip. What the film gives first is not a situation to solve but a climate to inhabit. Time is weather here. People practise waiting the way others practise a trade. They bring a chair outside when the rain relents. They return inside when the rain remembers itself.

What happens does not happen the way events usually do. Occurrence is stretched until purpose thins. Cuts are earned rather than granted. A child moves across a yard at the speed a child crosses a yard. The eye is left to accommodate the fact that duration is the only truth of movement. A squeeze box exhales into evening as if evening’s temperature depended upon it. In a common room men drink until the glass teaches their bodies a grammar that speech cannot steady. An announcement is read in the tone of modest ceremony and the settlement receives it as the weather is received, a report about departures and grants and the imminent return of a man who will lend pattern to hunger. Everything is ruin and yet what organizes this ruin is not catastrophe. It is the old turn toward another promise that resembles every promise already exhausted.

The structure walks and then retraces its footprints. We step forward, glance back, step again. One scene returns wearing the memory of an earlier gaze. A gesture that was almost invisible acquires authority. A person who was a figure placed far off becomes a face close by and the closeness is not intimacy so much as another kind of distance. The day circles until circling is the only progress that admits itself. This is not a puzzle for a clever eye. It is a discipline that gives each hour the same weight while a line of story pretends to gather what will not be gathered.

At the edge of the village a doctor has preserved a small sovereignty by remaining apart. His room is a cave of bottles, notebooks, instruments that know the names of illnesses they cannot cure. He drinks and writes with a method that holds long after the hand has forgotten the reason for it. From his window he inventories the town with the precision of someone who hopes attention might compensate for action. He keeps a diary of movements that do not amount to travel, the hour someone leaves home, the hour another returns. This ledger feels like a defence against the sleep that threatens to swallow the settlement. The film lets him look until looking becomes intolerable. Planks are nailed across the window. Light stops knocking. His breath becomes the only sound his room respects.

A child wanders where tiredness and malice trade masks. She speaks to a creature in order to learn what power is and finds only quiet altered into panic and then into a quiet that has lost its capacity to answer. No flourish protects the scene, no accusation is offered on our behalf. The camera is exact and calm. The film denies us the relief of righteous recoil. The girl goes on. The village goes on. Somewhere a bell counts a rhythm that will not be padded down by anyone’s tears.

Two men arrive like a new weather front. One has learned how to make sentences march. The other knows how to be a wall and an echo. They talk about roads to be built, funds to be distributed, destinies that can be folded into maps. Their assurance is measured rather than bright, as if they were explaining to people the operation of a machine the people vaguely remember dismantling with their own hands. The listeners lean toward the voice the way grass leans toward a thin sun. Confidence is a form of magic and magic needs the audience to want it. Desire is the only surplus these rooms still produce.

An office exists somewhere outside the frame where letters are typed and signed and filed. The clatter of keys is the most modern sound the film will allow, though it arrives with the air of something older than any face. A testimony that is not quite a confession becomes a document that is not quite a lie. The state travels on paper from desk to desk in corridors the villagers cannot imagine. The camera can. It lets the small percussion of that machine be the metronome of a power that would be comic if it were not what it is.

The tavern reassembles the town for a night. A table is moved aside and a tune unrolls like rope across a floor, and bodies try to turn drink into motion with a grace that errs and then forgives itself. The camera watches with the courtesy of a wall. This dance is both stupid and beautiful. It keeps sickness at a distance for the length of a melody. It permits a quarrel to declare and soothe itself. It shows how the tongue grows light and then heavy between one glass and the next. When the music quits there are no echoes, only breath and chairs and the dark that knows each way home.

Weather is the only authority here. It arrives, holds, recedes, returns. Water turns earth into a surface that refuses to reflect. Straw gains the weight of rope. Roof tins drum out a patience inconsolable and precise. People raise their voices when rain is near as though a volume of sound could announce that their speech is not part of the same system. The camera is loyal to water the way some films are loyal to heroism. It recognises in the rain the equality the settlement cannot produce, the truth that everyone is under the same sky and the sky is not impressed.

Money emerges as an object and the frenzy it produces is exact. Hands that no longer trust their own digits count and count again. Paper is folded into clothing and hidden in places the body believes to be secret because the body has always kept treasure where it can feel it. Plans are enumerated. A project is promised. Two men whose skill is the conversion of longing into interest lift their share in a manner that feels almost tender. The bills leave and return as numbers in the talk of another room. Paper binds more tightly than faith once faith has been misused by weather.

A barracks still stands on a patch of land the town calls the estate. Orders were once spoken there. Now only stale sentences remain. A man leads the villagers to this building as if to a shrine. He tells them what they need to hear, that the harm that has visited them belongs to a plan which can be turned to good if properly understood. They sleep on soldier’s boards and dream of eating at a long table where no one asks anyone where they were before this. In the morning the building is a building, the leader a leader, and the group keeps moving because to be still would confess too much.

Cows return to the roadway because the road is theirs whenever people are busy with endings. They stand and look and revise nothing. They are held by the camera with the same regard given to faces. This regard does not make them allegory. It makes them equal. When they turn away we are not refused. They have simply remembered grass.

Time is the subject and the instrument and the room. It stitches scenes with a slow needle and it loosens seams that had seemed tight. We learn to look in the tempo of a field. We learn to hear air and walls and the small exact noises that furniture makes. We begin to think that nothing has occurred. We see that everything has occurred. This is not dream. It is justice in the apportioning of attention. A footstep and a death share a level. A con and a confession are given the same daylight. This proportion does not flatten life. It gives it the measure it already had.

Some would say such looking is cold. It is not cold. It is faithful. It refuses to let narrative rescue us from the sight of a child being a child or a drunk being a drunk or a liar being a liar. Faithfulness is a burden because it does not relieve. We want reprieve in speed and in wit. The film declines to practice either on our behalf. It is not punishing us. It is asking us to be present.

Smoke is another weather. It hangs above tables where men pretend to domesticate the dark with flame and learn again that flame invites the dark to stay. It cuffs the corners of a mouth that is telling a story it cannot tell without haze. Light finds smoke and writes briefly upon it. The camera lets light have its amusement. We are reminded that appearance and substance live next door and that sometimes appearance entertains substance in the more generous room.

There is a moment when the town rehearses its ending by watching itself. People gather and face a space where an answer ought to come. The space provides fog and noise. The noise belongs to a machine that never arrives. The villagers understand without being told that their sentence will be delivered without a voice. The two visitors continue to talk. Their words are not deception. They are what language does when it outlives the conditions that made it forceful. In such air plans grow like weeds, multiple and weak.

Men cry, men grin, a man vows to go, another promises to return. All postures are correct and none is corrected. The film grants each the oxygen required to burn down to ash. No one is improved. Everyone arrives at a small conclusion manufactured from his own fuel. The flames do not meet. The house does not rise.

Water travels along ditches cut when men still believed dirt could be taught geometry. The belief failed. The water remembers the grooves. This obedience is the only courtesy the land extends to the absentee engineers. Bridges joke softly. We cross and cross back. Music invents an air from trudging and hunger and news that does not change. The tune refuses to rescue. It goes on because going on is what an air can safely do.

Unbroken shots return minutes to the world so that beginnings can be seen. We are not good at beginnings. We arrive by rushing about and hoard conclusions like coins. Here we are made to wait for a choice to assemble itself in a face, for a room to admit its pressure, for a lane to accept a body. Duration instructs with a firmness that does not humiliate. Soon a small movement feels like a gift because it has been allowed to become itself.

We follow Irimiás across stretches that would refuse a map. He walks with the quiet of an expert of ends. He watches like the one who keeps livestock knows the sky. He can step into a yard without being heralded and can transform an insult into consent before anyone notices that trick. He is the professional of the last corner and the world pays him with attention and with silence. He will depart with what he was due and with what was not his and he will call the total a levy and be accurate.

We remain at other times with the girl whose last entitlement has been relinquished. She looks at barrels, puddles, the thin air near the ground. From her height the horizon is close and indifferent. Hatred comes, fails, leaves. She speaks to a creature that cannot answer and then to nothing that can. The film allows her finding to occur without ceremony. The afterglow of her finding enters the town like a sickness with no fever.

A sound returns and becomes our only clock. It may be a bell, a pan struck by a tired hand, an engine that stays out of sight. It does not mark hours. It marks persistence. It tells us that even here there is rhythm that refuses collapse. We attach to it until we notice that we have learned how to live inside a film long enough to miss its heartbeat when it stops.

Rooms are plain and impolite. They confine and protect with the same tone. A window exists to prove that sight fails as often as it succeeds. A table is there to count money and to refuse to count what money costs. A bed welcomes bodies that want to be one and denies bodies that mistake nearness for answers. The camera lives among these objects until their manners become ours.

A cow stands in rain and rain is dignified by the cow. A cart fails and then is mended and then declines by another route. A man runs and looks absurd because this land is not persuaded by haste. A woman walks and becomes a blessing because walking is what dignity must do when dignity has feet. The film keeps record of these truths and declines to polish them.

The ending does not announce itself as ending. A man seals a window and sits with the dark his hand has earned. Elsewhere others travel toward a building where a speech will be offered for the hundredth time and will sound new to those who need it. Paper hides in a jacket that lies across a chair in a room where every noise makes its rights plain. Rats attend because they go where people go and this is not their crime. The weather continues to perform its office. We have learned to sit with the refusal of purpose and to accept that the payment for our attention is to have spent it.

The title remembers a figure whose step has always returned. The dance goes forward and back and forward again as if the new forward learned something from the back. The film does not illustrate this truth. It is this truth. It takes us somewhere and carries us back and then again, with sight slightly altered, with breath slightly changed. We keep time because keeping time has become ours and not the film’s. When the image leaves the wall we are not emptied. We are furnished with a manner of seeing that asks nothing more than that we keep it for as long as we can.

To exit is to discover that the walk home has been lengthened by minutes that did not exist earlier. Traffic lights hesitate. Feet feel heavier and more exact. Night learns to be quiet without sulking. Chairs accept the body with more ceremony. Windows regard us without encouraging possession. We understand that there has been no conclusion. We understand that conclusions belong to people who wish to stop looking before they have learned what the eye can endure. The task we have performed has not been comment. It has been the labour of joining a time that would not be made better by hurry. That is why the bell still rings in the head and mud still adheres to the imagination and a figure at the far end of a lane viewed from absurdly far away still holds the gaze longer than any story would think to ask.

The settlement remains after the names pass, not as a destination but as a method by which places declare their truth when they no longer have anything to trade. Its people remain, more exact now than those you meet in the queue, because they have been spared classification into objects of contempt or compassion. The visitors have moved on to the next corridor where light is poor and certainty speaks easily. The girl has been given such quiet as the film was able to grant. The doctor sits and sees nothing and teaches by his stillness that seeing nothing can be a form of sight we ought to practise.

Length is a teaching. It is not a test of endurance. It makes us capable of the present by taking away our preference for later. Each hour is a chamber. We are asked to stay and hear the house breathe and to accept that roofs always leak and that leaks are not an argument. When we can do this we can receive the smallest changes as gifts. A weight shifts on a chair. A curtain forgets the wind in a new way. A coin is counted twice because the fingers hope for a second sum. None of these motions is vain. They are the dignity left over after slogans expire and plans wilt.

If the film’s last kindness is to be named, it is this. It does not invite us to judge the people in the room who watch it beside us. It shares its patience without announcing generosity. It asks us not to turn what we have seen into knowledge that will keep us safe. Safety is not what is on offer. Equality is. Equality between speech and rain, between bell and line, between field and face, between our watching and the lives we watched. We carry that equality a while and the world is bearable because it has been seen under a law that does not ask it to be anything but itself.