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
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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