TIFF 2011 / PSIFF 2012: THE TURIN HORSE / A TORINÓI LÓ (2011)

My kneejerk reaction to watching Béla Tarr's Berlinale winner The Turin Horse when it screened in the Masters sidebar at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) was to recite the childhood jingle, "One potato, two potato, three potato, four." In essence, this summed up the film's narrative thrust. Then again, only Béla Tarr could exact such exquisite rhythm, resonance and weight—not from a childhood jingle at all—but from the following anecdotal wellspring:

"In Turin on 3rd January, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Albert. Not far from him, the driver of a hansom cab is having trouble with a stubborn horse. Despite all his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the driver loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to the throng and puts an end to the brutal scene, throwing his arms around the horse's neck, sobbing. His landlord takes him home, he lies motionless and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words, and lives for another ten years, silent and demented, cared for by his mother and sisters. We do not know what happened to the horse."

The Turin Horse suggests that the horse's possible fate is a comparable world weariness and sickness of the soul. As Dimitri Eipedes synopsizes in his program notes for TIFF, the ailing horse has given up providing the livelihood on which an aging father (János Derzsi) and his daughter (Erika Bók) depend, as if sensing the inevitable. The horse "refuses to eat, drink or carry them where they need to go. Nevertheless, the man and his daughter forge ahead with their tasks, even after their one attempt to escape confirms there is nowhere left to go." Eipedes explains that Tarr, "has crafted a mostly dialogue-free meditation on how humans refuse to give up the fight even when there's no battle left to win" or what Robert Koehler describes—in his informative Cinema Scope interview with cinematographer Fred Kelemen—as an "absurdist essence, the will to go on despite all dire signs to the contrary."

The Turin Horse contests mythologist Joseph Campbell's assertion that it is through the performance of everyday tasks that one's brilliance shines through. Rather, it suggests that the weight of repetitious tasks extinguishes any form of brilliance. Only a master like Béla Tarr could render such weariness incandescent. Though Fred Kelemen's B&W cinematography seems less lustrous than Tarr's previous entry The Man From London—the whites less milky and the blacks less inky—the look of the film remains hauntingly beautiful, if dauntingly grey. Tarr's long takes, of course, are an acquired taste, if not a calculated exercise to frustrate spectatorial patience and, thereby, destabilize expectation. The Turin Horse sports—count 'em!—30 such long takes or as Kelemen describes in his conversation with Koehler: "The moving image is thus a thinking image."

The program capsule for the film's appearance in the Awards Buzz program at the upcoming 23rd edition of the Palm Springs International Film Festival—as Hungary's official submission for the foreign language category at the 84th Academy Awards®—suggests that Tarr's adamance that The Turin Horse will be his final film—"he plans to stay busy by opening a film school in Split, Croatia"—might account for the film's "sense of finality." Rarely has such a keen observation of the quotidian signaled an impending end to the world. Fortunately, the cancellation of the film's release after Tarr's well-publicized interview with the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel—wherein Tarr accused the Hungarian government of obstructing artists and intellectuals, in what he referred to as a "culture war" led by the cabinet of Viktor Orbán—appears to now be a sequestered memory.

Critical reception for The Turin Horse has been thoroughly aggregated by David Hudson at MUBI, first from the film's premiere at the 2011 Berlinale (where it won the Jury Grand Prix as well as the FIPRESCI prize for best film in Competition), the subsequent Der Tagesspiegel controversy, the film's appearance at the 2011 New York Film Festival, and two lovely pieces from that festival, first by Daniel Kasman on the film's "mesmeric viscosity" and next by Doug Dibbern on "tracking shots at the gates of dawn."

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Béla Tarr, Daniel Kasman, Dimitri Eipedes, Doug Dibbern, Erika Bók, Fred Kelemen, Hungarian Cinema, János Derzsi, PSIFF 2012, Robert Koehler, TIFF11, Viktor Orbán,

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PSIFF 2011: CARANCHO—A Critical Overview

Programmed within my favorite sidebar at the Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF)—i.e., Awards Buzz: Best Foreign Language Film (which this year is featuring 40 of the 65 official submissions to the 2011 Academy Awards®)—Pablo Trapero's Carancho (2010) chases the shrill sound of ambulance sirens. I first caught this film at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and feel now is a good time to revisit those notes.

As synopsized by PSIFF: "Rooted in the reality of the corruption and violence of Buenos Aires, this gritty modern-day noir features Ricardo Darín (The Secret In Their Eyes and The Son Of The Bride) as Hector Sosa who, like the titular vulture-like bird, swoops down on unfortunate victims of Argentina's shockingly commonplace road accidents. Having lost his law license, he is relegated to the role of ambulance chaser for his thuggish employers who profit from a flourishing industry of false claims and insurance scams, fleecing victims of the bulk of any settlement received through their 'foundation.'

"When he meets Luján [Martina Gusmán (Lion's Den)], an overworked medic who is wrestling with her own demons as she tries to save the lives of Sosa's 'clients,' he has a dramatic change of heart, but his plans to escape this life and change his ways go horribly awry. With crisp, tight editing, this lean and suspenseful thriller takes us through accident sites, hospital wards, and seedy interior settings that would be perfectly in place in a Hollywood noir. Carancho is the latest example of director Trapero's trademark socially realistic cinema."

Carancho explores the notion that "behind every tragedy, there is an industry." As Diana Sanchez detailed in her program notes for Carancho's North American premiere at TIFF 2010, Trapero's film is "a story drawn from the alarming violence on his country's streets" and "an engrossing love story set among people who trade in sudden tragedy and death." Tracking the film's press notes, Sanchez writes: "Each year, more than eight thousand people are killed on the road and over a hundred thousand are injured. As a result, a disturbingly large part of the Argentine economy revolves around traffic accidents, and a profit stands to be made from the ongoing flow of medical expenses and insurance claims. Trapero's sixth feature plunges into this murky world of opportunism, spotlighting the crooks that swoop in on emergency rooms and accident scenes."

At Twitch, Todd Brown reported from the film's Cannes premiere: "A film that fuses stellar character work and intimate drama with larger thriller and heist moments with a few elements of shocking violence thrown in for good measure, Carancho is a masterful piece of work from writer / director / producer / editor Pablo Trapero. Trapero serves notice here that he is one of the very best film makers in the world today. Period. The complexity of his characters, the technical quality of the film work, his ability to balance intimate emotion with realistic and brutal action sequences, his obvious skill in working with actors—though that is made easier when you have actors the caliber of [Ricardo] Darín to work with—Trapero is at the highest level in all of these. Flawless? Carancho comes pretty damn close." As if to cinch the deal, Brown has included Carancho in his year-end top picks, emphasizing that "Ricardo Darín anchors Pablo Trapero's Carancho with a riveting, complex performance as a broken man slowly unraveling thanks to the tiny moré of conscience he retains. Classic noir in content if not in style, Trapero's film spins its amoral tale of insurance scams and ambulance chasing in as unaffected a style as possible, letting events play out in a cold, almost clinical fashion as his characters stumble inevitably to a bad end. The always stellar Darín has never been better and he's perfectly matched to both director and story."

At MUBI, Daniel Kasman praises Trapero as a steady, sure-handed genre craftsman. Kasman reported from TIFF: "Carancho has the solidity of construction and reliance on conventional character types and story arcs to effectively normalize a highly specific and localized setting. The result, like an early '30s Hollywood entry, is a workman film, one made by a director prodigious enough to pick such a unglamorous setting and proceed to cast it in a reliably realistic and unappealing light—'cause that's the way it really is. ...The film is so solid that any room for ambiguity is left out of the digital masonry of the mise-en-scène, which builds a clear schema where, simply, anyone involved in the nocturnal world of deaths and near-deaths, accidents and 'incidents' is implicated in the gloom, no questions asked. Thus the modest ambitions of a genre film stay within its modest limits, rather than escaping into the unease of the shadows, blossoming within gray shades of morality, or aesthetically expanded in risky angles, lighting, and other stylistics."

Cross-published on Twitch.

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Argentine Cinema, Daniel Kasman, Diana Sanchez, Latin American Cinema, Martina Gusmán, Pablo Trapero, PSIFF 2011, Ricardo Darín, TIFF10, Todd Brown,

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TIFF 2010 / AFI FEST 2010: CARANCHO—The Evening Class Interview With Pablo Trapero

Pablo Trapero was born in San Justo, Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1971. He wrote, directed and edited the short films Mocoso Malcriado (1993) and Negocios (1995) before directing his feature debut, the award-winning Crane World (1999), a black and white 16mm film that proved to be a breaking point in Argentine cinema and that encouraged dozens of young directors into their first features. Crane World was released internationally at Venice, harvesting awards and critical acclaim at film festivals around the world.

In 2002, his second feature El Bonaerense premiered at Un Certain Regard in the Cannes Film Festival, again to critical and audience acclaim. That same year he opened his own production company Matanza Cine in Buenos Aires, from which he has produced ever since not only his own features but also those of other Argentine and Latin American filmmakers, including Lisandro Alonso, Enrique Bellande and Raúl Perrone. "Matanza", Trapero informed me, is the name of the neighborhood where he was born and raised and literally means "the killing." El Bonoaerense was filmed there, as were several sequences for Carancho (2010), Trapero's sixth feature and Argentina's official submission to the Foreign Language category of the 2011 Academy Awards®. It's been picked up for North American distribution by Strand Releasing.

As a director, between shorts and TV films, his credits include Rolling Family (2004), Born and Bred (2006), and Lion's Den (2008). Carancho explores the notion that "behind every tragedy, there is an industry." As Diana Sanchez detailed in her program notes for Carancho's North American premiere at TIFF 2010, Trapero's film is "a story drawn from the alarming violence on his country's streets" and "an engrossing love story set among people who trade in sudden tragedy and death." Tracking the film's press notes, Sanchez writes: "Each year, more than eight thousand people are killed on the road and over a hundred thousand are injured. As a result, a disturbingly large part of the Argentine economy revolves around traffic accidents, and a profit stands to be made from the ongoing flow of medical expenses and insurance claims. Trapero's sixth feature plunges into this murky world of opportunism, spotlighting the crooks that swoop in on emergency rooms and accident scenes."

At Twitch, Todd Brown reported from the film's Cannes premiere: "A film that fuses stellar character work and intimate drama with larger thriller and heist moments with a few elements of shocking violence thrown in for good measure, Carancho is a masterful piece of work from writer / director / producer / editor Pablo Trapero. Trapero serves notice here that he is one of the very best film makers in the world today. Period. The complexity of his characters, the technical quality of the film work, his ability to balance intimate emotion with realistic and brutal action sequences, his obvious skill in working with actors—though that is made easier when you have actors the caliber of [Ricardo] Darín to work with—Trapero is at the highest level in all of these. Flawless? Carancho comes pretty damn close."

At MUBI, Daniel Kasman praises Trapero as a steady, sure-handed genre craftsman. Kasman reports from the film's North American premiere at Toronto: "Carancho has the solidity of construction and reliance on conventional character types and story arcs to effectively normalize a highly specific and localized setting. The result, like an early 30s Hollywood entry, is a workman film, one made by a director prodigious enough to pick such a unglamorous setting and proceed to cast it in a reliably realistic and unappealing light—'cause that's the way it really is. ...The film is so solid that any room for ambiguity is left out of the digital masonry of the mise-en-scène, which builds a clear schema where, simply, anyone involved in the nocturnal world of deaths and near-deaths, accidents and 'incidents' is implicated in the gloom, no questions asked. Thus the modest ambitions of a genre film stay within its modest limits, rather than escaping into the unease of the shadows, blossoming within gray shades of morality, or aesthetically expanded in risky angles, lighting, and other stylistics."

My thanks to Marcus Hu of Strand Releasing for setting me up to interview Pablo Trapero at the Toronto International and to Doug Cummings for publishing the transcript of our conversation on his AFI Fest website [here] in conjunction with the film's screening this evening at the Mann Chinese 6 Theatre in Hollywood.

Cross-published on Twitch.

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" Ricardo Darín, AFI10, Argentine Cinema, Daniel Kasman, Diana Sanchez, Latin American Cinema, Pablo Trapero, Strand Releasing, TIFF10, Todd Brown,

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