fuckinity
I don't know why anyone would want to watch a woman help her father put on and take off his clothes, eat potatoes and drink brandy over and over again for two and a half hours. The fact that this is listed as a drama is insulting to all the good drama out there.Virtually the only thing this movie has going for it is the stunning cinematography. Grainy, dreary and filled with angst. But if you think there's a story to complement this, you're dead wrong. There is no story. It's pure blooded European arthouse. Effectively rendering the whole movie as a glorified camera test. Either that or the pacing was just so excruciatingly slow I managed to miss all the key plot points as I was nodding off.The movie counts the days in which the "story" takes place which serves absolutely no purpose. Because there is no end goal, no finish line, no tension. Thematically, the movie speaks on the level of a Nietzsche obsessed teenager who is pissed off at his/her parents. Meaning it's very pretentious, has a lot of things it wants to say, but has no idea how to say these things. Which makes it stupid.Don't waste your time with this one like I did.
Andres-Camara
The movie begins with a plane of a horse pulling a cart that lasts four minutes twenty seconds, The amount of things that must count! No, it does not count anything that has not been counted in the first five seconds and would be long.This type of films that, because some critics say, have to go to the history of cinema, I hope they never get to do it. Because the truth is that history, the film has little.I would give just as much as thirty planes or five hundred, the problem is that the planes tell nothing. Once you have counted the first day, the rest is repeated. If he had done a short, surely it would have been the short of his life, but it is that each thing has its own.That obsession with making plans sequences in which the camera moves alone, without following anything, to tell anything, there are times when it leaves things totally dark or flat and you do not see what happens, if anything happens.We would say that the actors are fine, if they are great, the truth is that they are very well, and they get to do their role for two and a half hours, only their role does not have much to say.The photograph is beautiful, it gets you into that world, but in a few minutes you are bored.I do not think this movie is a movie, I would say that it does not reach a movie
tieman64
"The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile, but that it is indifferent. But if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfilment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light." - Stanley Kubrick "Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?" - Albert Camus Everyday is the apocalypse in Bela Tarr's "The Turin Horse". It opens with a parable about philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who encountered a horse being beaten in Turin, Italy, in 1889. The horse refused to work, refused to move, leading to repeated whippings by its owner. This sight led to Nietzsche spiralling into mental illness, depression and finally death. But why? "The Turin Horse" has been compared to Robert Bresson's "Au Hasard Balthazar", a film in which a donkey is incessantly abused by human beings. Tarr's horse is similarly treated, but its response is radically different. Bresson's donkey accepts and largely doesn't understand its fate. Tarr's horse, however, is a perceptive steed with the disposition of a four legged philosopher. His horse slips into depression, suffers an existential crisis and refuses to work, eat or even continue living. The horse, in short, rebels against its owners and life itself; it will not play.Suicide is also the final act of the horse's owners, an elderly cab driver (Janos Derzsi) and his daughter (Erika Bok). They live in a stone cottage which is incessantly pummelled by powerful gusts of wind. Inside the house, father and daughter huddle in the flickering light of lanterns. Outside the house, reality reveals itself to be malevolent, violent, dark and cold. The wind never steps, there is no respite, and the duo seem to expend all their energy attempting to resist it. Eventually, like the horse, they give up. Tarr's early films were explicitly political. As his career progressed, his films became increasingly abstract and metaphysical. For Tarr, a pessimist, politics offers no solution to humanity's problems. It is not simply that the horse is both beaten and exploited by others, but that a hostile universe, for Tarr, necessitates or causes man to exploit man, father to exploit daughter, man to exploit animal. Indeed, sharing water and brandy with "neighbours" and "strangers" is partially what leads to the father and daughter's demise. For Tarr, the sheer nature of Nature corrupts everything, everyone and every relationship. Everyone is at war, the film's nihilism echoing Schophenahuer and Nietzsche at their worst."The Turin Horse" is comprised of thirty long takes. Most of the film's action is intentionally repetitive, Tarr's characters trapped in their private Sisyphus myth. As is typical of Tarr, the film's shot in inky blacks and austere whites. Its cast, with their magnificent beards and sad eyes, recall Dreyer's "Ordet", and the spiritual but existentially brutal films of Bergman, Bresson and Tarkovsky. Tarr's outlook is much more defeatist, though. One character speaks of civilisation's drive to "acquire", "corrupt" and "debase", but the film's scorn goes far beyond systems of social organisation. "Everyday is the same, then you just disappear," Tarr would say in interviews. "There is no apocalypse...this is all I wanted to say." Such a stance was routinely espoused by philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who viewed the world as a penal colony in which pain must outweigh enjoyment, an assertion which he recommended be tested by comparing the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten."Turin" itself ends with "eating". Here the father and daughter sit at a table. "Even the embers went out," she says, referring to a dead lamp. "We have to eat," he recommends. But they don't. After all, what's the point? Fittingly, the film is structured as a series of "six days", reversing the Old Testament's six days of creation and seventh day of rest. Here, the Earth slides toward oblivion, followed by a day of total silence."The Turin Horse" was released in 2011, a year in which many similarly themed films were released, most notably Lars von Trier's kitschy "Melancholia", Abel Ferrara's "Last Day on Earth" and Brad Anderson's humble "Vanishing on 7th Street". Documentary cinema at the time was similarly rife with flicks heralding the apocalypse, usually due to environmental or financial catastrophe. All these films are heavy on doom and light on courses of action. "The Turin Horse" was Tarr's final film before retirement.7.9/10 – See "Ghost World", "A Prairie Home Companion", "Man Push Cart", "Papillon" and "Red Desert".
