Béla Tarr
A Torinói Ló

This is not a review; writing a review on this subject is beyond my capabilities: it is a signal, nothing more. Written on the emotional wave, moreover. So it's not as much mine as others, but I hope it achieves the desired effect and that at least one person is convinced to watch this "A torinói ló." But what is "A torinói ló"? "A torinói ló" is a very long elegy, a cemetery where only one body lies: the body of hope. It is a dream made of very long sequence shots, of depth of field and associated shadows. "A torinói ló" is all this, yes, but it's not enough: because the sequence shots do not reproduce time in its flow but capture its repetition, the insignificance of eternal passing, and the depth of field does not give the illusion of freedom but only of solitude, just as the shadows attached to the faces instead of plasticizing the characters leave them nailed to themselves or their existence, so stop and look elsewhere while life flows.
Turin, 1889. Nietzsche leaves his house and, seeing a man mistreating his horse, approaches it and throws his arms around the horse, as a sign of compassion or empathy: shortly after, a friend will bring him back home. But what about that horse? This is the film, narrating the following six days of the coachman's and his daughter's life. "Peasants of the spirit," they live in a shack in the Hungarian plain, and everything around there has nothing to do with life (nor with death): everything there flows and returns, returns and flows, and it really seems that time only passes to return to the starting point as if it had never moved; after all, already for the ancient Greeks time had a circular movement, which does not mean that everything is like before but only that we humans really do everything to escape death, even forcing time into repetition, into itself, into the eternal return.
It's a film for a few, certainly. Two and a half hours in black and white, few dialogues, just a few words here and there. And the camera often lingers on the waits, on objects—also for several minutes. The daughter waits for the potatoes to cook, and the next shot portrays her motionless sitting in front of the window for long moments. Then the gypsies arrive, the horse's illness, a neighbor asking for vodka and says.
He says: «And suddenly they realized there are neither God nor gods: they understood there is neither good nor evil. Then they saw (and understood) that if things were like that, then they themselves didn’t exist either». 
No plot, in short. Only the ephemerality of life, captured in its continuous replication, always identical to itself and too, too similar to death. Is this life? Poverty, cold, lack of love... be grateful for what you have and look elsewhere while life flows, because there are neither God nor gods, nor good nor evil—they are just human inventions to give meaning to the everyday pretending it has to do with the eternal, but the everyday is beyond good and evil and life—useless to ignore it—stops here.
(Back home, Nietzsche will be laid on the bed and assisted first by friends and then by his sister until his own death, but it is in that bed in Turin that, in his last glimmer of sanity, he opens his mouth and says: «Mother, I am crazy».)