On demand: "Damnation"

Six years before Sátántangó, and just before the lifting of the Iron Curtain, the Hungarian director Béla Tarr and novelist-turned-screenwriter László Krasznahorkai collaborated on 1988's magnificently doomy Damnation, effectively a Postman Always Rings Twice for the Mitteleuropan flatlands. It begins with the end of an affair. With the woman, billed only as The Singer (Vali Kerekes), calling time on this extramarital fling, her spurned lover Karrer (Miklós Székely B.) hops from bar to bar (one ominously called the Titanik), and inveigles himself in criminal activity - setting up his beloved's husband - as a means of filling the spare time he has on his hands. This slow creep into the shadows is shot in what would later be identified and labelled as the Tarr style: the camera seemingly on casters, proceeding at the pace of a funeral procession past a cast of beat-up or otherwise worndown sadsacks counting the flies in their lukewarm beer. (An early musical number, if that's not too energetic a phrase for it, features the singer lamenting "It's over/All over" like a Dietrich who's never known happiness in her life.) Damnation, exhaustion and frustration are hereby inscribed as fundamental to the human condition - or, at least, simply more central to the human condition than the exhilaration and elevation the American movies of the same period were trading in. In short: we are well and truly down among the dead men.

On the surface - if you caught five minutes on TV in the early hours - Damnation would appear pure arthouse self-parody: black and white and bleak as fuck, moving like molasses, full of glum-faced people pronouncing lines like "I like the rain" while staring numbly into the middle distance. Yet Tarr gives this aesthetic a new vigour. His roving peeping-Tom of a camera drills into the very depths of these scenes and relationships; his players are so drained they go round the back of lifelessness and become as compelling as zombies again. They're doomed, of course - you don't call a film that if your lovers are going to skip arm-in-arm into the sunset - but this is a universe where perdition comes in a thousand and one forms, re-introducing an element of narrative uncertainty. Will one of these wraiths summon up the passion to commit a crime of passion? Drink themselves to death? Drown in the relentless downpours? Be ripped to shreds by the stray dogs roaming these streets? Drop dead from inertia, lethargy, anomie? Or will they merely be brained by a lump of coal loosed from one of the mining carts passing overhead? Being archly modernist creations, Krasznahorkai's damned bang on about being characters in a story, but they're equally suckers and patsies in a conspiracy the movie invites us to participate in. That camera circles these bombsite locales as if sensing this is what will be left behind, like a jilted lover, once these people finally disappear from sight, as is their fate: rarely can a film's signs of life (the distant sounds of pick on rock, a concluding piss-up) have registered more like signs of death foretold. In a way, it's no more than brilliant pastiche: a postmortem of the movies its makers watched through jaundiced eyes on flickering monochrome sets. (There's noir here, yes, but also a lot of Antonioni, who I hadn't previously thought of as a Tarr influence.) This team's masterpieces were still ahead of them, and would be entirely their own thing - but Damnation retains a potent kick and hold, like watching the water drain out of the filthiest bathtub you ever did see.

Damnation is currently available to rent via Curzon Home Cinema and YouTube.