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There’s a moment in Béla Tarr’s 1988 film, “Damnation,” one of many excellent retrospective titles to emerge on virtual screens this year, that I’m tempted to describe as “very 2020.”
We are in a mud-soaked Hungarian coal-mining town, awash in gloomy spirits and gloomier weather. Amid a torrential downpour, a broken man clambers up a slope and finds himself face to face with a large, growling dog. Rather than back away, the man drops down on all fours and growls right back, seething and snarling and eventually scaring the poor creature off. The dog is defeated; so is the man, a loser in life and in love. But as is often the case in Tarr’s cinema, although the character’s motives may be specific, his condition is curiously, even banally universal. It’s as though we are all feral animals under the skin, destined to slog our way through a rain-pelted hellscape before tearing one another and ourselves apart.