The Turin Horse

I don't know whether Bela Tarr will keep to his word and not make another film but, if he does, he will have finished his film-making career with his best film. The Turin Horse is about very little and yet it is about everything. It is a symphony with wind, a horse and two humans.

In it we see the daily routine of an elderly man, Ohlsdorfer, and his daughter, who live a minimal existence in a rudimentary cottage in a God-forsaken place in central Europe, presumably Hungary. We see six days of their lives, each day introduced by a title. The highlight of their routine is their meal of a single boiled potato each, eaten with their fingers from wooden plates in about five minutes. When they rise in the morning Ohlsdorfer drinks two glasses of the local firewater, palinka, while his daughter goes to the well to fetch two buckets of water.

They have a horse which, at the beginning of the film, is linked to Friedrich Nietzche, and this little back-story succeeds in keeping the horse in our attention. In fact the horse, remarkably, in it's enigmatic speechlessness, becomes the emotional centre of the film. The Hungarian rain and mud that we became familiar with in earlier Tarr films is here replaced by a hellish wind, audible on the soundtrack throughout the fim. Even going outside is difficult, and the atmosphere is always laden with leaves and dust. There is a visit by a neighbour to fetch some palinka and, after he has unburdened himself of a political rant, he is sent on his way with a disparaging put-down by Ohlsdorfer. There was humour of this type in earlier Tarr films. Otherwise few words are spoken other than by Ohlsdorfer, who is elderly and slightly handicapped, to give instructions to his daughter.  Early in the film the daughter expresses a query that I'm sure is on many viewers' minds when she asks her father, after a brief conversation about woodworm, 'What's it all about, Papa?' He replies that he does not know. So little happens and yet I was gripped because the slightest change or incident in the routine makes one wonder where it will lead. One by one things on which their simple life depend start to fail, until the continuation of their life seems impossible, and the film fades to black. I was reminded of Beckett by the timeless fundamental nature of the world it depicts but with, instead of Beckett's abundance or words, Tarr's abundance of cinema.

The music is striking. It is a simple repeating dirge-like motive that could easily have come from Philip Glass. The wonderful monochrome cinematography, much of it in the near-dark interior of the cottage, is by Fred Keleman, the film-maker who made Abendland and the unseeable Frost, a film whose ownership is still the the subject of contention. Both Tarr and Keleman work in the European tradition of 'slow' cinema, traceable to Tarkovsky.

Compared to The Turin Horse, the other films I have seen recently have the weight of TV commercials. This film left emotions and images that will stay with me for a long time.