REVIEW: The Turin Horse (2012)

Being unlikeable is a dangerous art form.  Most films try to avoid it, for obvious reasons.  They tell (or aim to tell) economically-paced stories about charismatic characters that end in one satisfying catharsis or another.  It's the bedrock of classical drama, Hollywood cinema, Syd Field's screenwriting guide, and most movies you will ever get the chance to see in theaters.  But there are filmmakers who deviate from this—it's a difficult trick to pull off, and it can inspire awe when it works.  After all, it takes skill.

They say that a truly great actor could read from the phone book and hold an audience's attention.  If the same could be said for filmmaker, the Hungarian director Béla Tarr would have to be near the top of the list.  His films are known for extremely long takes, a near absence of what would conventionally be called action, and a disregard for the patience of anyone except the most dedicated.  (One of his most famous films, Satantango, runs over seven hours).  His latest, The Turin Horse, which he has fashioned as a swansong, collected awards around the festival circuit last year and landed quietly in the US in February.  In its widest run, it played in 5 theaters.  This month, it comes to DVD—you can find it on Netflix, though not Netflix Instant—giving audiences the widest-ever access to one of the year's most devastating masterpieces.

By way of a framing device, The Turin Horse begins with a brief historical legend from the late 19th century, when a workhorse suddenly refuses to budge no matter how hard it's whipped, attracting the attention and sympathy of none other than Friedrich Nietzsche.  Nietzsche has left the story before the film even begins.  What we get instead are the two farmers who owned the horse, a father and a daughter, who settle in to weather a fierce windstorm, and whose meager existence in the Hungarian countryside runs parallel to their now obstinate beast of burden.

The narrative of the film—and The Turin Horse exists right at the edge of narrative filmmaking—could be mapped not by an arc, but by a slow spiral.  The camera maps the same location over and over again, capturing (nay, stamping in) the routine of the characters.  But don't confuse a slow tempo with aimlessness; the routine will slowly alter and darken, bit by bit, over the course of two and a half hours, before a finale that doesn't even give the satisfaction of a resolution.  The daughter helps dress the father.  They fetch water from the well.  They boil potatoes as their only meal.  They try to get the horse to move.

The film's worldview is relentlessly bleak.  If life is nothing but toil, why go on?  The only answer the film offers is that this is the best we've got.  As swansongs go, it's quite a note to end on.  What's remarkable is that Tarr has found a style as unforgiving as his message.  There is very little in the way of dialogue; we get the sense that anything these characters could say to one another has been said long ago, and the silence is broken mainly by a third-party monologue about how hopeless life is for the lower classes.  The soundtrack is a repetitive score, both melodic and droning, that establishes a routine of its own.  Right from the beginning, it becomes a film of seemingly contradictory extremes: an epic with one location, an unblinking view of squalor that is never less than beautiful to look at it, and a vision of human life that manages to be cold and evoke empathy at the same time.  To experience the film properly is, in a way, to submit.

Seeing the film, I was reminded of the earlier arthouse era, where grand existential allegories from the likes of Bergman and Bresson were relatively common.  Today, in a post-Tarantino world, they seem almost like an anachronism.  In truth, Tarr's vision of life is far more pessimistic than either Bergman or Bresson, who both saw a potential for grace or redemption.  In a way, it's a question of religion: Bergman and Bresson grappled with the existence/role of god in a world that offers neither rewards nor answers, and Tarr takes their angst to its most atheistic extreme.

Naturally, this can be a bitter pill, and I hesitate to even call it a pill.  Cinephiles can sometimes be a dour bunch, decrying the pap of Hollywood endings, but there's not any more absolute truth in The Turin Horse's bleak atheism than there is in, say, Carl Theodor Dreyer's faith, or the optimism of Jacques Tati and Steven Spielberg.  But Tarr's Nietzschean hell is undeniably a vivid and articulate vision.  Technically, it's masterful: his use of black and white imagery, long takes, and sound design is as visceral as anything in film today.  I don't think I'll ever forget the wind in this film.

It is, in short, a masterpiece in ways that are both modern and old-fashioned.  It's a difficult film by design, a beautiful and intoxicating ordeal that can leave you emotionally drained.  But if you want to explore the farther reaches of what a film can do, The Turin Horse is a stunning place to look.

5 out of 5 stars.

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The Turin Horse is now on DVD and Blu-Ray