The Turin Horse

Some­what face­tious­ly, and with tongue placed firm­ly in cheek, the Irish lit­er­ary crit­ic Vivian Merci­er wrote that with ​‘Wait­ing for Godot’, Samuel Beck­ett had ​‘achieved a the­o­ret­i­cal impos­si­bil­i­ty – a play in which noth­ing hap­pens, that yet keeps audi­ences glued to their seats. What’s more, since the sec­ond act is a sub­tly dif­fer­ent reprise of the first, he has writ­ten a play in which noth­ing hap­pens, twice’.

What might he have made of The Turin Horse, the ninth the­atri­cal fea­ture from Hun­gar­i­an colos­sus, Béla Tarr? Sure­ly he’d admire the cycli­cal nature of a descent into dark­ness in which noth­ing hap­pens, six times.

In much the same way that only a sin­gu­lar­ly gift­ed word­smith such as Beck­ett could trans­form said noth­ing­ness into the most intox­i­cat­ing of propo­si­tions, Tarr’s uncom­pro­mis­ing for­mal con­trol ensures that The Turin Horse remains noth­ing short of riveting.

Nar­ra­tive­ly stark and pos­sess­ing an aus­ter­i­ty of tone that eschews the absur­dist moments of lev­i­ty present in 2000’s Wer­ck­meis­ter Har­monies or his mag­num opus from 2004, Sátán­tangó, this sup­pos­ed­ly final film con­tin­ues to explore such notions as the immutabil­i­ty of human nature, the futil­i­ty of resis­tance against pre­de­ter­mi­na­tion, and the inescapable sta­sis dealt by the cards of fate. These the­mat­ic pre­oc­cu­pa­tions have long char­ac­terised Tarr’s work and are made espe­cial­ly bleak in this case by the defeat­ing drudgery of sur­vival that negates even the con­cept of hope.

A char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly daz­zling open­ing sequence sees a lame farmer dri­ving his horse through a typhoon of Old Tes­ta­ment pro­por­tions. Lat­er, we’re intro­duced to the farmer’s daugh­ter and the oppres­sive rou­tine of the pair’s dai­ly chores, under­scored by the recur­ring dirge of Mihá­ly Vig’s string score.

With title cards announc­ing the pass­ing of days, the same scenes recur with sub­tle but increas­ing­ly sig­nif­i­cant and mon­u­men­tal shifts in per­spec­tive. Close-ups of weath­ered faces reveal no trace of emo­tion. With con­ver­sa­tion non-exis­tent, char­ac­ter and rela­tion­ships are divined through action; the few words between the pair are exchanged with per­func­to­ry haste. A sin­gle scene with a pass­ing neigh­bour, stop­ping by to share a glass of moon­shine and some world­ly wis­dom, offers per­haps the one chance to read some high­er pur­pose into these lives led with­out significance.

But beyond such sisyphean cycles of rep­e­ti­tion, the father soon dis­avows any ques­tion of tran­scen­dence with a force­ful­ly abrupt, ​“Come off it! That’s rub­bish!” As the well dries up and the stub­born horse refus­es to move, Tarr sinks the pair fur­ther towards the lit­er­al dark­ness that will final­ly envel­op them.

Whether the cin­e­mat­ic rap­ture of the final moments are to be con­sid­ered nihilis­tic or ecsta­t­ic – full of hope at man’s capac­i­ty for sur­vival or weighed down in res­ig­na­tion at the ulti­mate point­less­ness of exis­tence – is a ques­tion for each view­er to decide for themselves.

Whichev­er way you look at it, though, if this does prove to be Tarr’s last film, one couldn’t ask for a more mas­ter­ful, pure­ly cin­e­mat­ic coda to this sin­gu­lar and most Beck­et­t­ian filmmaker’s aston­ish­ing career.