I once had the opportunity to see Bela Tarr give a brief, heartfelt introduction to his “Werkmeister Harmonies” at Facets Cinemateque in Chicago. It was hard to understand him due to a combination of microphone issues and his own mumbling, but he pulled himself together long enough to insist that he loved his characters in the film, that "he is them." An interesting testament from someone largely considered a miserablist; in fact, it points to his radical humanism—a humanism cloaked in contradictions, but a kind of love  nonetheless. A case in point for this would be the epic amount of time we spend with the two main characters in "The Turin Horse," an invalid father and his grown adult daughter. Theirs is a squalid situation, and Tarr demands that we share it with them for two and a half hours, essentially forcing identification through intimate proximity and sheer duration.

Tarr and frequent screenwriter/collaborator László Krasznahorkai begin their latest film with a darkened screen and a (possibly apocryphal) story of Friedrich Nietzsche witnessing a horse being beaten. The story goes that he embraced the horse, and descended into madness for the rest of his days; the film’s droll narration ponders, "But whatever happened to the horse?" We then open on one of the film’s first of many bravura long takes, seemingly the work of a steadicam operator in conjunction with a platform and a crane (I can think of no other way, technically speaking, that the shot could have been pulled off). The camera oscillates between long shots and close ups of the horse and cab driver, traveling alongside them and then pulling in front of them or falling back behind them, at one point veering off the trail to view both horse and rider in full profile. Far from being merely virtuosic, this opening shot succinctly encapsulates much of what we are in store for: duration, exhaustion, minimalist repetitions—both visually and in Mihály Vig's hypnotic score—and barren, windswept landscapes (indeed, wind becomes as prominent a part of the soundtrack as does the score).

Jonathan Rosenbaum noted that Tarr believes this film to be about "the inescapable fact of death." While that's probably true, I think it immediately points to contradictions within the work, and we can itemize a few here. Though the film is indeed intimate, it’s also monumental: Its hard, gritty mise-en-scene could have been carved of granite, its every texture, every surface, is emphasized, the nooks and crannies of tables and walls, and faces. Getting dressed becomes a deliberate chore, as if the process of going outside must be delayed as long as possible; the daughter assists her father, applying frayed, worn-out clothing that takes on weight only after accumulating four or five layers. Next to the duo's cooking of potatoes—apparently their only form of sustenance—this clothing ritual takes up the most narrative space. Another seeming contradiction: this mundane existence is captured with an impossibly elegant camera, long tracking shots that constantly shift, change perspective, investigate, pan left and right in a serpentine dance. (A strange formal predilection that links Tarr to two genuine humanists, Ophuls and Renoir, but also Miklós Jancsó, himself something of a cryptic, abstract miserablist.) In one of the few dialogue exchanges during the film, a neighbor stops by to get some booze from the father. The two men share a few drinks while the neighbor monologues a philosophical tirade about humanity and the dismal state of the world. Are we meant to take the neighbor’s musings as Tarr’s perspective, or father's? The latter listens patiently before telling the neighbor that he’s full of shit.

"The Turin Horse" is full of Tarr’s dark humor (largely absent from the Hungarian's last feature, “The Man from London”), and it contains at least one of his absolute best gags. Fed up, without water (their well has inexplicably run dry), father and daughter pack up their meager possessions and leave their house with their horse. In an epic landscape shot, we watch the trio of travelers walk along a vast field before finally disappearing over the horizon line. I mistook it for the film’s final image, but instead of fading to black, Tarr holds the shot until, minutes later, the trio reemerge and start back the way they came. What sort of cosmic gallows humor is this, the idea that seemingly nothing could exist in the beyond that is better than the hole they’ve spent so much time in already? Other inexplicable acts, including the mystery of the well, suggest some kind of divine intervention: A lamp in the home stops working, casting father and daughter into darkness. The conversation that follows is appropriately absurd, as the two question what could be making the lamp, which is full of oil, keep fading in and out. Of course, it’s nothing more than their cruel creator, Tarr himself, pulling their leg.

Reminding us of the fact that there is a third character here, Aaron Cutler, writing for Moving Image Source, finds much to ponder in the face of the horse. It’s true that Tarr frequently lingers his camera in extreme close up on the horse’s visage, simultaneously allowing us to contemplate the beast and creating the sensation of being looked at by the horse itself. The animal's refusal to move or eat, the act that motivates much of the film, is an interesting quandary; without anthropomorphizing the creature, is Tarr nevertheless suggesting that he's made a conscious choice? If so, it’s a decision that the human figures refuse to make for themselves. The cooking of minimal sustenance, the fleeing from and returning to the ‘home,’ all suggest a determination to live, regardless of the circumstances. Could this be construed as hope? If so, it’s Tarr’s final joke—a joke that sticks in the throat, that somehow still manages to skirt outright cruelty. Somehow, the entire world seems contained in these four walls, with these two people in the throes of an uncaring universe. Tarr seems to be laying it all on the table here, the messy contradictions of life—he can’t go on, he goes on, forever. We can’t go on, and yet we do.

Review by:
Daniel Gorman