Béla Tarr's relentlessly bleak, enigmatic, and incredibly invigorating Werckmeister Harmonies opens with a 11 minute shot of János, the town's holy fool and Tarr's always observing protagonist, explaining the details of the upcoming lunar eclipse to a bar full of drunks.  He patiently organizes several willing participants to play the part of the sun, earth, and moon, orchestrating their precise movements and eventually involving everyone in his beautiful waltz of celestial order.  At just the right moment, he halts the motion and illustrates the principals of the eclipse, stressing the stages of darkness and light that pervade the rest of the film in its cinematography and its themes.  The imperfection of János' attempt in creating a perfectly rhythmic representation of the natural event also plays into one of the films many key themes - the danger of attempting to create perfect order in a universe that rejects it.  It is a remarkable opening sequence that stands on its own, but its full effects are not felt until further into the film.

Aside from delivering papers, János occupies himself looking after Uncle György, a reclusive music theorist who wishes to avoid the insanity of the outside world in favor of developing a perfect musical scale.  He believes that the 12 tone musical scale developed by Andreas Werckmeister has created a faulty foundation for all music written since and since all this music is inherently false, even the masterpieces of the past several centuries have failed to achieve the perfection that most people claim they have.  György's obsessive need for perfect order and eradication of all impurities mirrors that of the fascists later in the film, yet he is also representative of the impotence of intellectuals against the hysteria of the masses and the oppressive force of those in power. 

The small town where they live goes through a metamorphosis of sorts when the circus arrives bringing with it a large, mysterious whale and an unseen character known only as "The Prince".  The arrival upsets the natural equilibrium of the town and to counter the confusion and disorder brought by this new presence, Auntie Tunde, György's estranged wife, rallies the town around her new organization formed to "cleanse the town".  Her evil intentions are immediately clear but the fact that her character is played by the heavenly Hanna Shygulla, a heroine in numerous Fassbinder films, make her conniving, deceitful nature even more difficult to swallow.  The sense of dread that the giant beast brings with it is felt throughout the remainder of the film and Tarr's graceful long takes create an atmosphere of inevitable and inescapable horror that comes to fruition in the film's mesmerizing finale.

Tarr has claimed that his films contain no allegory, but although the presence of the whale and Prince can be seen as an overwhelming and ungodly force brought upon the town, it is difficult not to see the behavior of the newfound group's actions as purely fascist.  By equating fascism's demands for absolute order with those of György, Tarr illustrates the instinctive nature behind the human thought process that creates an oscillatory relationship between anarchy and order.  Although this is the most obvious theme that Werckmeister Harmonies touches on, it is dealt with on a large scale inviting multiple interpretations and in a style that achieves its own balanced harmony expressing feelings of wonder, melancholy, hope and despair in the form of a beautiful tragedy.  Tarr's long shots (the 140 minute film is comprised of only 39 separate shots) cast a gaze over what unfolds and the audience becomes a silent observer, much like János, helpless to change the outcome and only able to witness the course of events that occur with an unstoppable inertia.  Revolution is as inevitable as the movement of celestial bodies and while the film leans towards a belief in pre-destination (at least in the nature of long-term historical and political shifts in power), the hope that some critics find lacking is described in the opening scene when János mentions the light breaking through the moon at the end of an eclipse.  When he asks the bar patrons to "step with me into the boundlessness where constancy, quietude, peace, and infinite emptiness reign.", doubling for Tarr's request of the same from his audience, you must be willing to take the journey through despair and hopelessness with him.  It is an arduous task, but the film achieves a transcendent and etherial beauty that only the few truly great masterpieces attain.