I think there is some sort of rule that if you are an Eastern European filmmaker you have to have at least one scene of marathon group drinking in some sort of brightly lit holiday ball room. (Hell, Milos Forman managed to squeeze a whole movie outta that.) The Prefab People doesn’t disappoint on this measure, but it does disappoint if you are looking for a dreamy, surreal cinematic symphony like Tarr is known for. (I’ve only seen his Werkmeister Harmonies which is a carnival of long takes, music and tracking shots.) This is more of a kitchen sink, Mike Leigh-like slice of life presentation of a marriage falling apart. We open with the man stomping out the front door and leaving the woman behind, crying, with the scared kids and then we flash back to fragments of scenes of what got them there. We don’t really know who these people are – we just get to observe the moments, knowing they are leading to an unhappy end. Very low-budget and low-fi (those aren’t sound effects, that’s the rattle of the camera), the performances are sincere and the camera is probing. Not a pleasant film, necessarily, but an interesting experiment, especially considering where this filmmaker is headed.
