The Turin Horse (2011)

A torinói ló, Hungary / France / Switzerland / Germany / USA, 155 minutes
Directors: Bela Tarr, Agnes Hranitzky
Writers: Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Bela Tarr
Photography: Fred Kelemen
Music: Mihaly Vig
Editor: Agnes Hranitzky
Cast: Erika Bok, Janos Derzsi, Mihaly Kormos, Mihaly Raday

Together for 30 years of moviemaking, Hungarian director Bela Tarr with his life partner Agnes Hranitzky (credited on some films as editor and on others, as here, also as co-director) produced a uniquely recognizable body of work. Their movies have resemblances to and affinities with the work of other directors (Bresson, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, etc.), not to mention a host of students in their trail (Lav Diaz, Jim Jarmusch, etc.), but nothing else is much like them. They are arguably stunt movies, slow, overlong, ponderous, willfully opaque in passages. The Turin Horse, for example—which is more or less their official sign-off—comes in at a relatively trim two and a half hours and contains only 30 takes (an average of more than five minutes between cuts). I'm actually much more OK with technical cinematic tricks like that than with some of the narrative conceits they indulge, e.g., "Satan's Tango," the name and seeming motivating idea of their seven-hour-plus masterpiece. I had similar problems with the touchpoint core of The Turin Horse, which true confession I never picked up on until I read up more on the picture in recent days.

The Turin Horse opens with an incidental anecdote, related by the voiceover narrator (Mihaly Raday), about the German philosopher and cultural critic Friedrich Nietzsche. Or at least I thought it was incidental. It's the story of the day Nietzsche snapped in Turin, Italy, when by the unsubstantiated legend he saw a horse being viciously flogged. Come to understand, the unfortunate conceit of The Turin Horse is that the horse in it—a figure in this movie reminiscent of the figure of the donkey in Au hasard Balthazar—is the very horse that Nietzsche saw in Turin. Well, OK, but it plays hell with the setting, a dry outland of eternally blowing wind and dust, out of which a random third character wanders in at one point with a largely incoherent rant but clues that we are in some kind of science fiction post-apocalyptic world like Cormac McCarthy's The Road. So it's no later than 1920 (how long do horses live anyway?) yet it is post-apocalyptic. OK, whatever! Maybe it's an alternative World War I. It's just, did it really have to be the very horse that sent MC Zarathustra around the bend?



The Turin Horse is full of stirring music, portentous mood, inspired camera setups, brilliant sound design, and in the action stark terror, even starker love—really a bottomless wonder to contemplate. The thing about Nietzsche is a small point, easily missed in the larger rhythms of the picture (and best forgotten, I say). The main action shows the subsistence of a man and his daughter and horse on a farm in a world going dry. The wind blows constantly in this picture, sometimes musical but more often keening and oppressive. Ohlsdorfer (Janos Derzsi) has a nonfunctioning right arm. He is in his 60s but otherwise strong and healthy. His daughter, a woman in her 30s (Erika Bok, who sometimes looks like Shelley Duvall and sometimes like Frances McDormand) must help him dress and undress and works the farm with him.

In fact, the movie is really mostly a patient observation of their daily routines, by which they survive. The first 15 minutes, for example, involve Ohlsdorfer returning from chores or something in the wagon drawn by the horse, finally arriving home, and then the wagon and horse are tended to and put away. It sounds so prosaic but it's so engaging, with the horse shot from beneath at heroic angles and wonderful moody sawing music. The routines of putting away the wagon and horse are so ingrained in the man and woman they are almost unconscious, with the rhythms of dance. The wind blows and blows. The Turin Horse is no less than magnificent on a big screen.

Times in this strange world are calamitously hard. Dinner is only one boiled potato each. Breakfast is brandy, second glass optional. That seems to be it for nutrition. As the picture starts, the horse—a mottled gray mare, with patches of black and white, unusual coloring, the best we can make out in the black and white film stock—is giving up, often refusing to work and beginning to refuse food and water. Yet even when The Turin Horse is at pains to show the misery and fraught conditions of their life it is often hypnotic and beautiful. The dinner of one potato is shown several times. The first time is focused on Ohlsdorfer, using his one good hand to hold the potato against his palm as he scrapes away the skin with his fingertips. (I can't understand why these people don't eat the skins, by the way.) He must move quickly because the potato is so hot. We see his daughter the second time, who uses a more dainty style, blowing on each piece methodically before putting it in her mouth. The third time we see them in medium in profile. He is on the left and she is on the right. The next time we see them she is on the left and he is on the right.

There is a stressful encounter with gypsies. The horse never gets better and then the daughter doesn't have much of an appetite either. More science fiction concept seems to be happening toward the end—for some reason, darkness swallows flames, puts out lamps, and smothers embers taken from the fire in the stove. I'm giving it all away but it's evident early that, whatever the reason, there's little reason for hope in this landscape. The Turin Horse is bleak but beautiful, not exactly uplifting but inspiring for being so well done. Just try not to think about that Nietzsche thing too much.