The Desert Of The Tartars (Il Deserto Dei Tartari) is a film that has been described as a cross between Beau Geste and Waiting For Godot, and into that mix I would toss some of the films of Hiroshi Teshigahara, especially Woman In The Dunes, as well as the troop interactions seen in the 1960s American television sitcom F Troop, even though The Desert Of The Tartars is not a comedy. This is because the slow moving and contemplative first half of the film follows the setting up of the main military officer characters between each other, and with their men, while the second half of the film speeds up the pace of the diegetic time, and focuses more on the reactions of the officers to the world outside their fortress, rather than within it. The reason for these comparisons are that, unlike three of those four mentioned influences, this 140 minute long, color, 1976 film, by Italian director, Valerio Zurlini, with a screenplay by André G. Brunelin, based on a novel by Dino Buzzati, called The Tartar Steppe, is a film almost hermetically sealed from laughter. Having stated that, it's not a film that is overly somber. It is the sort of film, like those in the canons of Bela Tarr, Theo Angelopolous, and John Cassavetes, that is simply nonpareil, in the sense that there really is no other film like it, for good or ill. Overwhelmingly, I'd claim that the film's difference is overwhelmingly for the positive, but there are a few negatives that keep the film in the near-great category, rather than that of the unequivocally great.
Review of The Desert of the Tartars
