Film Review: The Turin Horse (A Torinoi lo)

In 1985, Hungarian director Bela Tarr heard a story in Budapest involving Friedrich Nietzsche.  Witnessing a Turin cabbie whipping his horse in the street one day, the philosopher wrapped himself around the equine in a fit of empathy.  Nietzsche’s mental and physical health deteriorated soon after and he died a decade later.  For decades now, Tarr wanted to tell the story of what happened to that horse—a sequel to an anecdote, if you will. 

The film is broken up into six days.  Filmed in black and white, The Turin Horse (A Torinoi lo) takes place in late 1800’s, opening with a resonant woodwind-filled fugue driving the decrepit titular animal as she pulls her owner through fog-injected gales.  The melancholic theme rears itself many times over as the story presses on through the mundane last days of elderly gimp father Ohlsdorfer (Janos Derzsi)) and his grown daughter (Erika Bok).  We witness their simple routines of dressing, retrieving water from the well and eating boiled potatoes as their one meal of the day.  Every once in a while after we've grown accustomed to their lonely lives, they might receive a visit whether from intrusive gypsies or a pontificating neighbor who drinks palinka (a traditional fruit brandy) with the couple and breaks the silence of the nearly wordless screenplay unleashing a passionate monologue about the human condition.  Other than that, the frames are filled with laundering, wood-chopping and stoking the fire.

A serious voice-over narration sometimes updates us on the couple’s rather sorrowful existence, when the soundtrack isn’t filled with the foreboding repetitive theme or the musicality of the wind beating at their walls.  The setting is as depressing at the condition of the horse—she of little movement or appetite—a foreshadowing of the couple’s imminent future and doom.  The film’s tone is strong and unrelenting.  One must have patience and a sense of humor to either enjoy or endure it.  While I was part of the latter group, it was clear the director had much love and plenty of fans in the audience. 

Before the screening, Tarr spoke about the lovely sunny mid-October weather New York City was experiencing while introducing a presentation of his final film.  “Are you sure you want to see this?  It’s an ugly piece of shit?” he asked the audience much to their delight.  After the screening, audience member after member tried to press the director with questions he, for all intents and purposes, answered dismissively with, “it’s all there on the screen,” and “I had nothing left to stay,” as The Turin Horse is his final film. The director couldn’t even be too bothered by specifics pertaining to the mechanics of the film.  For the wind, they simply used “old weather-type machines” and “good people” to move them.

He was able to provide a few scraps about the horse depicted in the film.  They found the animal through auditions like they would any actor.  This particular horse was lonely, lazy and close to death.  Yet, after the film completed, the horse found a much better life living in the forest and pregnant.  If you see her in this film, you will understand that her new life is nothing short of a miracle.

While Tarr’s thematic objectives may have been bleak, impressing that “life is full of routines” and “we get weaker and just disappear,” he also emphasized the passion he and his crew invested into the film, “we put our heart on the table.”  The woman to my right informed me that she attended an interview with Tarr earlier that day and learned that he would be starting an international school for filmmaking.  

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