You not only make it through but actually enjoy nearly eight hours of rainy, black-and-white bleakness about the failure of a communal farm, and you've earned significant envy in some quarters.

The food is delicious...but the portions are SO LARGE!

Its seven-hour runtime warns off dabblers, the one-screening-a-day bulk defies profit motive, and its protagonists -- Tarr's "poor, ugly, sad, and damned people" -- deny expectations of pleasure. It is also, at times, funny as hell.

With Kieslowskian aplomb, Tarr adopted the writer’s knack for multiple points of view, his cyclical chronology, and his interlinking of individual narratives.