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Hungary, 2011, 146 Minute Running Time Genre/Subjects: Drama, Historical/Period, Literary Program: Contemporary World CinemaLanguage: Hungarian English Subtitles
DIRECTOR: Béla Tarr Producer: Gábor TéniEditor: Ágnes HranitzkyScreenwriter: László Krasznahorkai, Béla TarrCinematographer: Fred KelemenPrincipal Cast: János Derzsi, Erika Bók, Mihály Kormos
In the film he says will be his last, Hungarian director Belá Tarr (Satantango, The Man From London) conducts a grim, fascinating, 146-minute study of the grueling everyday tasks a weather-beaten 19th-century farmer and his long-suffering daughter must complete, again and again, in order to survive. But first, Tarr provides an intellectual key of sorts. On January 3, 1889, we are told, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche beheld, on a street in Turin, Italy, the sight of a horse being mercilessly whipped by its angry owner. Distraught and sobbing, Nietzsche threw his arms around the animal's neck: then the author of Beyond Good and Evil promptly retreated into silence and madness for the last 10 years of his life. Truth or fiction? No one knows.
In The Turin Horse, beautifully shot in black and white by Tarr's longtime collaborator, Fred Kelemen, the horse of the myth becomes an enigmatic, nagging presence in the lives of the struggling farmers. He even refuses to serve them. Is he a symbol of universal suffering? Of humanity's failures? Something else? There are no easy answers to Tarr's extended metaphysical riddle. Like Nietzsche's twilight, the film unfolds mostly in silence, interrupted by a howling wind and a minimalist organ-and-violin score by Mihaly Vig. Strangely hypnotic and relentlessly desolate, it unfolds on as many levels as we choose to see. —BILL GALLO