Beating a Dead (Turin) Horse

          There was a moment during a recent screening of Bela Tarr’s new film The Turin Horse (A torinói ló in the original Hungarian), about two hours in, when a collective groan rose from the audience (a groan, the sentiments of which I shared).  The groan wasn’t a reflection of the film’s quality or artistic merit, so much as of the sheer heaviness of watching a film of The Turin Horse’s nature, of the cross you bear when you decide to sit down and tackle one of the somber and sedate epics that have become Tarr’s trademark. 

Tarr’s new film, his ninth in a 35-year career, has been billed as his final one and, though it’s not his longest (that would be the 7 1/2 hour Satantango) or his best (The Werckmeister Harmonies), it’s a worthy addition to his canon nonetheless; a culmination of the themes and style the Hungarian has worked with for decades.

            In life, one occasionally sees a good film (and sometimes a great one) that, though aesthetically pleasing or in undeniably high taste, is so relentlessly uncomfortable a viewing experience it can only be watched once.  The Turin Horse is the latest addition to my list of such films, joining the ranks of John Cassavetes’ 1974 A Woman Under the Influence and Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 magnum dope-us Requiem For a Dream.  The black-and-white film is so spare, repetitive and ultimately bleak that re-watching it — re-visiting the lives of these desperate, doomed characters — would be an act of masochism for all but the most callous and hardened of film snobs. 

The Turin Horse is good art insofar as it conveys exactly the unpleasant feelings that Tarr wants it to, but its success is at the expense of the audience’s pleasure. The story finds beauty in its simplicity: a father, his daughter and their horse try to survive in a windy, apocalyptic version of the Turin countryside, eating piping hot boiled potatoes and occasionally fetching water from the well, repeating their ritualistic existence day after day in an attempt to stay alive.  You feel as the characters feel (that is to say, increasingly hopeless), and you don’t enjoy the film so much as you experience it.

Like all of Tarr’s recent work, it’s a collaboration with the Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai, best-known for his sentences, which often run uninterrupted for pages.  This long-winded writing style is mirrored by Tarr’s Spartan long-takes.  Despite its 2 1/2 hour running time, The Turin Horse consists of only 30 separate shots and, at most, 25 lines of dialogue.  The score, composed by Mihály Víg, is comprised of one minimalist theme, reminiscent of Phillip Glass and repeated again and again on a mixture of violin, cello and synthesizer, the perfect soundtrack for an existential crisis, or close to three hours of apocalyptic Hungarian desperation.

The Turin Horse isn’t fun.  It isn’t romantic.  There is no uplift.  Your voyeurism, in being forced to watch and wallow in these characters’ hardships, is enough to make you cringe.  And that’s a testament to Bela Tarr’s power, to the uncompromising nature of his vision.  Without dialogue, without color, without any kind of fancy self-conscious editing, he can still cut you to the core.  There is no easy explanation offered for the horrible living conditions of this world, where things falter and then just refuse to work.  It’s an oblique, abstract and formless kind of dread, a nagging feeling that choosing to wake up in the morning is just an exercise in postponing the inevitable.

After a long career of difficult films that don’t give to their audience so much as they ask from them, Tarr’s swan song of existential peasant despair in the face of a windy, apocalyptic world is fitting: a further exploration of the themes he’s toyed with for decades, in what is possibly an even bleaker manner than any of his other films.  The Turin Horse chronicles just six days in these characters’ lives, but it could be any stretch of time.  The end of the fifth day is enough to pull a despairing groan out of anyone, even a whole theater of people.  No one can beat a dead horse quite like Bela Tarr can.