Obiter Dicta Issue 9 - January 19, 2015 | Page 14

ARTS & CULTURE 14  Obiter Dicta Film reviews » continued from page 13 ê A rural farmer is forced to contront the mortality of his faithful horse.  Photo credit: vegafilm.com t humbs down Target’s epic fail in the Canadian market. Stronger roots lead to greater growth Are you looking for a challenging and stimulating environment where you can roll up your sleeves and dig in to the business of law? Come and put down roots with Lerners. With over 80 years of experience, we’ve grown to be one of Ontario’s leading law firms. We’ve nurtured the professional and personal growth of hundreds of students. Let us help you maximize your talents and energies so you can become the best lawyer you can be! To get the whole picture, visit www.lerners.ca. London Tel. 519.672.4510 Fax. 519.672.2044 80 Dufferin Avenue, P.O. Box 2335 London, ON N6A 4G4 Toronto Tel. 416.867.3076 Fax. 416.867.9192 2400-130 Adelaide Street West Toronto, ON M5H 3P5 www.lerners.ca L AW Y E R S with The Turin Horse. Ripe for metaphorical interpretation, its slender setup, black-and-white photography, and nearly unbearable grimness make for a bit of an ordeal. Still, it’s an exceedingly demanding, death-haunted masterpiece for the ages. Held up as the last grizzled lion of the European modernist tradition, Tarr is an unknown genius. His reputation among critics, directors, and cinephiles rests mainly on two of his nine movies, one of which is the seven-and-a-hour saga Sátántangó, about a decrepit agricultural commune invaded by a con man. From that mind now comes, aptly, a film about duration and endurance. Set in a 19th-century wilderness, The Turin Horse is also the logical, and indeed terminal, successor to Robert Bresson’s 1966 gloomy classic Au hasard Balthazar. It was inspired by an 1889 anecdote involving Friedrich Nietzsche, in which he observed a cart driver mercilessly beating an intractable horse and, weeping, threw himself around its neck. The stableman and daughter hardly speak: the barbarity of their struggle for survival as they fulfill their daily tasks requires no explanation. The only sound is the incessant howling of the wind, with intermittent interruptions from the thrum of mournful, repeating violins. Yet these ordinary hardships take on cosmic weight. Tarr is the cinema’s greatest crafter of total environments. In Tarr’s earlier productions – the nightmarish Sátántangó and the magisterial Werckmeister harmóniák – the heaviness was punctuated by incursions of the surreal and the grotesque. Next to them, The Turin Horse is a pared-down, sinewy parable. In it, Tarr dials up one of his most immersive milieus: the wooden table, the stone walls, the rough floors, the ropes on the horse, and the skin on the boiled potatoes. Time-stretching, expertly constructed, and painfully elliptical, Tarr’s best films are arresting, strange, wrenching, pessimistic, and laced with black humour. Watching each of them is like simultaneously taking an ice-cold shower and visiting the planet’s greatest art museum. They are so unyielding that when it is over, you feel both relief and outright awe. Here, in his post-Nietzschean, post-Marxist, postChristian way, Tarr takes a minuscule incident about the fate of a horse abused in the streets and mutates it into an erudite Genesis story in reverse. If you’ve got the stomach for it, The Turin Horse is an absolute, distinctive, and intoxicating vision of life at the end of its tether, of a world going inexorably into a final darkness. It’s an experience unlike any other, enveloping in a way that conventional movies are not, comparable to starting down the road with an empty sack, then, over the course of the journey, having it weighed down with rocks until you can’t go on. But this backb