I was recommended to see this film by my Hungarian teacher. We were looking at some Hungarian poetry, by Joszef Atilla, which was extremely sad, to do with loss and emotional poverty.
This film is definitely depressing. There is hardly any dialogue, and it is basically just 6 days in the life of a man, his daughter and his horse. They live in an extremely windy and cold sparsely occupied area of the country. Every day is much the same as the last. One of my favourite parts was watching the father and daughter eating one boiled potato a day, peeling the skin off the hot potato with their fingers, the noise of this action is so desperate and resonant, wet, as they eat in absolute silence, so hungry, but also their dire situation of poverty meaning they wolf some of the potato down, then suddenly lose their appetite and push the plate away.
Every day, the daughter goes out to the well to get the water for the day. With the water she washes and boils the potatoes. On the sixth day, the well is dry, and one of the last scenes is of the father and daughter sitting down to the regular potato dinner. The father bites into it and it sounds like an apple. The film drags you down to the depths of despair, although at no part does it drag. The silences, as the daughter dresses her father daily (he has one paralysed arm) are palpable, as he stares at her while she dutifully but heartlessly dresses him each day.
When they are not eating or dressing, they sit looking out the window or the daughter is looking after the horse. The old horse's health seems to deteriorate with each day. By the sixth day, the horse won't eat or drink. The well is dry, and the horse, their livelihood, is nearly dead. The film ends here.
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1889. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse while traveling in Turin, Italy. He tossed his arms around the horse's neck to protect it then collapsed to the ground. In less than one month, Nietzsche would be diagnosed with a serious mental illness that would make him bed-ridden and speechless for the next eleven years until his death. But whatever did happen to the horse? This film, which is Tarr's last, follows up this question in a fictionalized story of what occurred. The man who whipped the horse is a rural farmer who makes his living taking on carting jobs into the city with his horse-drawn cart. The horse is old and in very poor health, but does its best to obey its master's commands. The farmer and his daughter must come to the understanding that it will be unable to go on sustaining their livelihoods. The dying of the horse is the foundation of this tragic tale. Written by Anonymous
