The Turin Horse: Grade A

A

The Turin Horse (2011)
János Derzsi, Erika Bók; Directors Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, (Hungarian; subtitled).

I only discovered Bela Tarr in 2006 when I saw his 1988 movie, Damnation (reviewed in this blog 11/27/06). Turin Horse was his last film. Like Damnation, this one is long (2.5 hrs), extremely slow, shot in beautiful black-and-white, and ultimately about the desperation of life under totalitarian (communist) rule in Hungary. It is utterly mesmerizing, depressing, and beautiful, but only recommended for viewers who are committed to film as an art form.

A poor, elderly, and disabled country farmer in Italy, about 1900, makes a meager living carting goods, his horse an old, gray, sickly mare. He lives with his daughter in a fieldstone house in a cold, windy, treeless land where a howling gale rages for most of the movie. It’s always winter, cold, and bleak in a Bela Tarr movie, because that’s how life was under communism. The storm is the harsh and relentless politics blowing through the land, the dust making the simplest movement a challenge. The man and his daughter eat boiled potatoes, fetch water from the well, stoke the wood stove, gaze numbly out the dirty window, and sleep. She spends a lot of time dressing and undressing her father, who has a bad arm. They both spend a lot of time harnessing up and unharnessing the horse. This goes on and on, repeatedly.

Scenes are re-enacted in excruciating detail, every day. After about three cycles, I inwardly screamed, “Please, God, no! Not another boiled potato!” But yes, it was another boiled potato, and we again watched it being prepared, served, and eaten, in almost real-time. The same for all the other daily chores. Over and over with tiny, tiny variations, sometimes only in the camera movements or angles.

But this is exactly the point. The audience literally feels, viscerally, the hopelessness, the meaninglessness, the mind-numbing repetitiveness of that life. We understand experientially, in a way no narrative description could ever convey. That’s what makes the film an unforgettable artistic triumph. Yes, it takes a difficult 2.5 hours of nothingness to “get it,” but that’s a lot less than a lifetime.

A few things do happen, though. The horse gets too sick to work, and finally, the well goes dry. So they are doomed. They gaze numbly out the window into the winter storm. The final scene, of the two characters sitting at the table (over potatoes not boiled – no water), is pure visual poetry. They look somehow Christlike at that point.

The blurb for the film says that this old horse was the exact one that Nietzsche famously encountered in Turin in 1899. But that is a red herring that should be ignored. If the ads told you what the movie was really about (existential nothingness), you wouldn’t go.

The cinematography is extremely interesting and beautiful, the music hypnotic – deep bass and cello, repetitive, droning, beautiful, and soporific, in keeping with the tone. The visual images burn into your brain as you stare into the face of a human condition reduced to a mechanical numbness that strangely still retains its dignity. The portrayal is not completely realistic (e.g., who chops the firewood and cuts the hay for the horse; who maintains that stone house, etc.? Surely not the woman alone, and surely not the one-armed man). So there is a theatrical element to the storytelling, but the realism of the life somehow comes through that artifice brighter than actuality.

12:08 East of Bucharest: Grade A

A
12:08 East of Bucharest (2006)
Mircea Andreescu, Teodor Corban, Ion Sapdaru. Writer-Director Corneliu Porumboiu. Romanian (subtitled).

It seems clear that this film was made for domestic consumption in Romania. It’s hard to imagine it would appeal to an American audience, yet inexplicably, I enjoyed it tremendously. In a contemporary provincial town, a dreary television talk show interviews two locals, asking them where they were and what they were doing on that fateful day in 1989 when communism fell in Romania and dictator Ceausescu fled. The two men interviewed say they were out in the town square protesting the government and calling for its overthrow. But the interviewer presses them for details: were they protesting before 12:08 pm when the dictator fled, or were they celebrating after that time, when it was safe? In other words, were they really part of the revolution or just observers of it? The style of the questions and answers start to take the shape of an interrogation by the secret police, focusing obsessively on tiny details. The interviewees get defensive, angry, depressed, and defeated. In the background is a lifeless flat mural of the empty, barren town square in front of a concrete hulk of a government building. There are comments about whether the clock in the tower ever was accurate, a fine metaphor for life under communism. Callers-in to the show are hostile, dismissive, or contradicting of the interviewees. One claims life was better before the revolution. One is now a rich factory owner, but formerly was with the secret police, as the interviewees well know. He intimidates the interviewer about “libelous claims.” We start to understand the larger question of whether there really was a revolution at all for the ordinary people. What is different now? They still struggle to pay their debts and put bread on the table. It is a rich metaphorical film, reminiscent of a story by George Orwell, and one senses that it still touches raw nerves in Romania today. It also gives a rare look into provincial life there. I give the movie an ‘A’ because I enjoyed it so much, but it is so subtle that I wouldn’t recommend it to the average American movie watcher.