Review #903 - Turin Horse, The (2011)
THE SCOOP
Director: Bela Tarr
Cast: János Derzsi, Erika Bók, Mihály Kormos
Plot: A rural farmer is forced to confront the mortality of his faithful horse.
Genre: Drama
Awards: Won Jury Grand Prix and FIPRESCI Prize (Berlin).
Runtime: 146min
Rating: PG13
IN RETROSPECT (Spoilers: NO)
“Theirs
is the moment... nature, infinite silence.”
The
Turin Horse can be aptly described in three words: a
beautiful ordeal. Bela Tarr's final work
(or so he proclaims) is every moviegoer's nightmare – it is incredibly slow, incredibly
meandering and incredibly long. It runs
for about 2.5 hours, but it feels like a few days, really.
Endurance is
the key, and if you like arthouse films with no plot, it might just be barely bearable
for you as it was for me. Well, almost. Tarr's work focuses on just two characters -
an old farmer and his faithful daughter as they live in an isolated region that
is incredibly windy. I presume it was
shot in Hungary as this is a Hungarian picture, but it sure is one hell of a
windy place.
Like I
mentioned earlier, there is no plot in The
Turin Horse. We see six continuous days
of the duo engaging in mundane (but not necessarily uninteresting) activities
like waking up, fetching water from a nearby well, cooking boiled potatoes
(which is all they eat), sitting around and staring out of the window.
They try to
get their horse to pull their wooden cart to get to town, but to no avail. Tarr shot the entire film with only thirty
long takes, and dialogue is so sparse throughout that it is only after twenty
minutes that someone realizes that he has a throat.
Tarr describes
his film as one that is about “the heaviness of human existence”. He succeeds in showing this in The Turin Horse, which is a powerfully
bleak parable, if only it was more entertaining.
It is still
engaging in a visual way, with some of the best cinematographic work I have
seen in recent years. The steadicam work
is extraordinary and coupled with the hypnotic, almost funereal-like music by
Mihaly Vig (Tarr’s long-time collaborator), the film occasionally transcends
its seeming endlessness by focusing
our attention to the dark beauty of its world.
One of the
great Eastern European filmmakers of our time, Tarr’s work here is superb from
an auteuristic perspective, a tour de force in art filmmaking. But it is challenging to sit through. You need the mental endurance to last the
lap. And like the film’s characters whose
struggle to survive is a testament to their capacity for endurance, we may be
compelled to endure along with them too. I hope.
GRADE: B- (7/10 or 3 stars)
Tweet
Follow @Filmnomenon
Click here to go back to Central Station.
TRAILER:
OST:
Comments