The best film released last year — it has the Oscar to prove it — was an almost-silent film in black and white made by foreigners. “The Turin Horse” has all those characteristics. But it’s unlikely to make even the modest $40 million that “The Artist” has earned stateside.
It’s not just that “The Artist” featured an attractive cast, including cameos from well-known Anglophone actors, while “The Turin Horse” centers on an old farmer and his not-terribly-beautiful daughter. “The Artist” was a celebration of life. “The Turin Horse” is not just a meditation on death — it shows how some lives seem little better than the endless sleep of death.
Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, co-directing with his wife, Agnes Hranitzky, has said “The Turin Horse” will be his last film, though he’s only 56. But his movies take a long time to make: 1994’s “Satantango” clocked in at over seven hours. Tarr planned to become a philosopher, but the government barred him from higher education. Instead, he’s spent his career musing on life through his often opaque films.
| On screen |
| ‘The Turin Horse’ |
| 2.5 out of 4 stars |
| Stars: Janos Derzsi, Erika Bok, Mihaly Kormos |
| Directors: Bela Tarr, Agnes Hranitzky |
| Rated: Not rated |
| Running time: 146 minutes |
“The Turin Horse” is a strikingly beautiful black-and-white film. Tarr is known for his long tracking shots, and this nearly two-and-a-half-hour film has just 30 separate shots. But then, not much happens in it.
Friedrich Nietzsche famously lost his mind not long after seeing a man whip his horse in the streets of Turin, Italy, in 1889. The German philosopher, sobbing, put his arms around the animal. But Tarr isn’t interested in what happened to Nietzsche — he wonders what happened to the horse.
And so we spend two and a half hours watching the horse complete its daily tasks alongside its owner (Janos Derzsi) and his daughter (Erika Bok). Their every day repeats the one before. In their small cottage, they eat for sustenance alone — potatoes they peel with their bare hands while they’re still hot. The scenes here give new meaning to the term “painstaking detail.” Symbolism abounds — or so we’d like to think. Otherwise this is simply a documentary about two very boring people.
