The most depressing film ever?
Wow. There's a lot of competition for that. I've watched a lot of East-European films. So lessee.
Mind you, I'm going on memory from sometimes 10-15 years ago. Also, spoilers ahead, but I'm sure you werent going to see them anyway.
There was Sokurov's
The Second Circle, which consisted of a young man travelling to a godforsaken Siberian-looking place because his father is dead, and lying in a prison-cell like sparse home. Lot of moody shots of him feeling numb, his father lying there. Waiting. Nothing much else happens. (Check the User comment by Frank Blaakmeer in the IMDB link above.)
Then there was Sarunas Bartas'
The Corridor. Bartas' movies have very sparse dialogue. This one is black and white too. We see a corridor, in a building that could be a deserted psychiatric ward or just a stripped down communal building in the middle of Soviet nowhere. The camera pans and circles a lot, and we see otherwise unidentified people mulling around, drinking and occasionally, but mirthlessly dancing. Everything seems muddy. A boy is taken outside and repeatedly beaten.
Bartas is always good for depressing movies. For example,
Few of Us. The dark- and empty-eyed actress who plays in most of his films is dropped by a helicopter somewhere in the endless pine forests. It must be in or around Siberia, because a while after the beginning scene in which she's clambering over rocks for five minutes, she arrives at a threadbare hut, where the people speak an indigenous language, not Russian (if I remember correctly). They drink a lot. Nothing happens. The girl watches.
Hungarian filmmakers are also excellent in the genre. Janos Szasz's version of
Woyzeck perhaps takes the biscuit. Again black and white I think. Woyzeck does heavy manual work on some station in a nothing town. His boss sadistically puts him down. He has to do the hardest work. He loves his child (or children?), but his wife hates him, or rather, despises him. He toils on, helplessly ("tovabb, Woyzeck, tovabb" = "onward, Woyzeck, onward"). Then he arrives home one day and finds his wife f*cking his sadistic boss. She sees him, stares at him, and continues. He goes out and kills his child(ren) in a sort of helpless revenge.
The same director then made
The Witman Boys. Initially, the film has a much prettier feel, at least, that is to say, in this dark, historical Kafkaesque way. It's set in a bit more picturesque, if stifling and impoverished pre-war era, rather than in some undefined Soviet time. Two identical twins are secretive, loyal to each other and noone else, and unloved by their unaffectionate mother. Instead, they strike up a friendship with a prostitute, who
is kind to them. They decide to give her a present. But to get the present, or the money for the present, or I dont remember, plotting is to be done. The slow, almost silent mudslide of the narrative still shocks you when they murder their mother.
Hungarian art movies tend to end with death, often suicide, so often that its a bit of an incrowd joke. I dont remember much about Arpad Sopsits'
The Shooting Gallery except that it was heartbreakingly sad, beautiful in this stilted, silent, depressing way, and was about a boy, a teenager?, whose father mistreats him, or perhaps his mother. Again it still comes somewhat as a surprise when he kills his father. In the end scene (as I remember it), he waits silently in front of the police station, the still blue lake behind him.
And there's Bela Tarr, of course. His last masterwork, six years ago already, was
Werckmeister Harmonies. Long, black and white, mysterious to the point of inaccesability, and - imo - wondrous and soulshakingly moving. My girlfriend on the other hand, I think, fell asleep. Impossible to describe, I'd think, but the
"plot summary" on IMDB does pretty well actually.
I also once saw a Kazakh movie - or was it Uzbek? - called...
The Dove's Bell-Ringer. At a filmfestival. The first hour was excruciatingly slow, without the benefit offered by many of the above films of beautifully moody, almost mystical images. A very effective representation of mindnumbing boredom. There's a boy and a girl. For some reason (run away from home after a fight, I think?) they have taken refuge in the hut he spends his days in (being the dove's bell-ringer). They argue a lot, though with very few words. They are obviously attracted to each other, but haplessly so, and he struggles with awkward agression. Nothing much happens through most of the film until a dramatic end, in which they both, I believe, die violent deaths.
In the same year, I saw a Czech movie called
The Cow. It's about a cow. Well, about the peasant who owns it. Work is hard, murderously so. Veering away from the minimalistic, almost non-involved style of the above films, this director lends a heavy religious symbolism of suffering to the film. They struggle to survive and to retain their dignity and independence (against an at least implied backdrop of oppressive forces). That's about it. The IMDB plot summary adds some detail that I dont remember: "As a child, fleeing the bleak reality of his mother's life as a prostitute, [Adam] tumbled from a mountain and was mentally injured. Years later, his mother is dying, so Adam sells their only cow to pay for medicine".
Fred Kelemen's
Frost deserves a mention too. Unlike in his previous, grim, grainy
Fate, in which a staggering, lost drunken woman collapses into a dingy cafe where the men, instead of helping her, end up raping her, this film seems more quiet. But after over three hours of seeing a mother and son, homeless or lost between places after fleeing the man who beat her, trudge in real time through frozen fields, a desultory funfair, unidentified scenes of urban desolation, you will be sure to feel even more depressed. On the other hand, at least (well, according to me, not according to the IMDB raters who rate it 4.7 out of 10), it absorbs you in a kind of visual trance -- unlike the Austrian movie
Struggle, which is filmed with effective harsh distaste, and leaves you with same.
Lots more like these...
The Asthenic Syndrom,
D'Est,
The Cremator,
Three Days,
Swan Lake - The Zone,
The Outpost.. And Romanian films appear to add a Ceasescu-esque note of terror to the ubiquitous numb or metaphysical loneliness, for example in
The Oak or
Every Day, God Kisses Us on the Mouth..
Closer to home, Mike Leigh's
Naked is pretty depressing too, and Greenaway's
Baby of Macon is depressing in its extravagant repellingness. But thats a whole different kettle of fish.
