The bad press is really undeserved.
I wholeheartedly agree. A lot of people thought that it was an exercise in "applied style" but, while there were a couple of scenes that felt a bit like reunions for the cast of Satantango, I felt that Tarr was pushing his aesthetic in new directions, particularly with respect to sound design and narration. The use of Simenon was brilliant and I loved the way that Tarr went back before noir to the world of Carne/Prevert films like Quai des Brumes, reworking not only their atmosphere but their approach to knowledge. In fact, the film struck me as a supremely intelligent meditation on the process of narration. As you watch that stunning opening shot, it becomes clear that it is both a concrete result of the camera being planted behind the ropes mooring the ship and a reflection on the nature of cinematic perception (via. the angularity of the ship, the chiaroscuro that seems to split it in two, and the simulation of "flicker" as the ropes pass), as well as a potent narrative symbol that can't be reduced to a single obvious meaning.
The essence of Tarr's art consists in exactly that sort of dynamic interaction between the concretely material and the abstract, and I thought he was pushing both those elements and their relationship in surprising directions in this film. In the second shot, he plants the camera behind the protagonist's head (a trope that serves to block easy subjective identification and is repeated throughout the film), and then moves it forward to reveal a grid-like array of windows through which the city can be seen as both a "real" place and a sort of geometric abstraction, whose stark diagonal planes are set against the flat surface of the window panes (another motif that runs throughout the film, and one that subtly develops the elements present in the first shot). What was most amazing to me, though, was the way that those panes are treated as frames; the camera selects one and zooms in and through it, giving the viewer the illusion of inhabiting a self-contained narrative space before pulling back to re-introduce the overall "grid" and reveal that "scene" to be only a fragment of interrupted perception. This, in turn, is set against the spatiotemporal continuity created by the sequence shots. Tarr, had, of course, reflexively explored the idea of narration before, most markedly in Satantango, but both the method and the results are very different here (probably because he's working without Laszlo Kraznahorkai).
It's a bold film and while it's not as good as, say, Werckmeister Harmonies, it's ludicrous that it will probably never have US commercial distribution (not that this is surprising, of course).
