Movies Reviews

The Turin Horse (A Torinói ló) – Movie Review

By Ron Wilkinson Feb 21, 2012, 15:42 GMT

A rural farmer is forced to confront the mortality of his faithful horse. ...more

Hungary's Oscar entry for Best Foreign Film, Béla Tarr’s final work is a masterwork. Although a masterwork beyond most viewers’ appreciation.

In 1889 Friedrich Nietzsche had been writing for nearly twenty years since he served as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian war. His traumatic experiences in the war deepened his reservations about the human race. He had come to doubt the ability of the race to think and act clearly and in accordance with the demands of its own survival.

In January, 1889, in Turin Italy, he witnessed the whipping of a horse in service drawing a hackney cab. Throwing his arms around the horse he begged the teamster to stop. In three days he was in deep, silent depression and stayed that way for ten years until he died. The screenplay for this film is the imagined aftermath that befalls the horse, the teamster and his daughter after that fate event in Turin. Things do not work out well for them.

Béla Tarr may be the master of the atmospheric. He is certainly the master of the long take. His 1982 video adaptation of Macbeth is comprised of only two shots. He does it because he likes the continuity and because he considers the moving photograph to be a choreographed dance, a ballet. That is the long and short of “The Turin Horse,” directed by Tarr and co-directed by his spouse(?) Ágnes Hranitzky. Tarr has announced that it is his last film; he will retire from film making after its release.

Regardless of his reason, his method works. He won at Cannes in 2005 for his film “Damnation,” and this film won the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear and the FIPRESCI Prize after also being nominated for the Golden Bear. Gus Van Sant was inspired by the purity and simplicity of Tarr’s long takes when he radically changed his style with “Gerry,” a stream of consciousness adventure starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck.

“Horse” takes place over a period of six days, and the film is broken into six segments. Each segment has only a few takes and the total running time is 146 minutes. The first words occur after about an hour of run time. During that time there is nothing to see or hear but the routine movement of the two actors and the horse and the constant howl and chaos of the wind and dust around their stone hut in the barren plains.

The first hour establishes the routine of the farmer Ohlsdorfer (János Derzsi) and Ohlsdorfer’s daughter (Erika Bók), which begins in destitute poverty and goes downhill from there. True to this extremely minimalist form, the film is shot in stark black and white that is riveting in its unvarnished intensity. It is a straight shot to the heart.

The feeling of the film is similar to Lars von Trier’s recently released “Melancholia,” with the qualification that “Horse” is stripped down to the barest essentials. There is almost nothing sensory in the film except the movement of the actors, which itself is as slow and simple as possible. The exceptionally noisy, continuous wind and the debris whirling in a cloud like locusts contrast with the stillness in the hut.

The screenplay by longtime collaborator László Krasznahorkai and the director re-enacts the profound depression Tarr imagines Nietzsche to have fallen into as the last act of his increasingly painful and alienated life. It also re-enacts the screenwriters’ impression of the end of the world as being inseparable from the end of sensory consciousness. The background music is by another long time Tarr collaborator, Mihály Vig, and sound like an updated of the traditional Western funeral dirge.

During the course of the film the farmer and his daughter are visited twice. The first time by a neighbor dropping by to purchase liquor made by Ohlsdorfer, the second time by a band of gypsies wanting to take the two, or at least the daughter, away “to America.” The feeling is as if the world is reaching out a last hand of farewell and then giving the couple one last chance. Of course, they decline the chance, even though they know that to continue on their present course spells their end. They are destined to do so.

Their destinies and that of the horse that will not move are inextricably intertwined. The wind outside calls them and they have no more control over their fate than they have control over the elements. They try to leave but turn back. They try to get the horse to move and it will not. In the end, they try to create one last chance of sensory stimulation in the lighting of a lamp. It will not light. The end of the film is one of existential blackness.

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Directed by: Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky
Written by: László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr
Starring: János Derzsi, Erika Bók and Mihály Kormos
Release Date: February 10, 2012
MPAA: Not Rated
Running Time: 146 Minutes
Country: Hungary / France / Germany / Switzerland / USA
Language:  Hungarian
Color: Black and White