Man, Woman, Loneliness, and Death; 'The Man Who Became a Horse'

The play 'The Man Who Became a Horse' is the third work of Amir Hossein Ghafouri, a twenty-nine-year-old Iranian filmmaker, which received a warm welcome at the Dubai Festival. Although the film seems fundamentally difficult and struggles to engage ordinary cinema-goers: it is a different experience in Iranian cinema - a clear homage to Bela Tarr, the astonishing Hungarian filmmaker - borrowing the cold atmosphere, strange characters, and long takes from films like 'The Turin Horse.' A loose interpretation of Chekhov's 'Sorrow' does not find much opportunity, and the film is intensely evasive of any kind of storytelling. 'The Man Who Became a Horse' is an anti-narrative film that minimizes the storytelling to the possible minimum; we only encounter an old man living with his daughter in a remote place by the sea, preventing her from leaving with her husband, whom she married a year ago. The film strongly intertwines the theme of loneliness with a strange atmosphere and keeps stranger characters - extremely cold - at a distance from us. No form of empathy is intended; on the contrary, we witness a highly surrealistic world that has little to do with everyday reality. In fact, the film constructs another world with its own specific rules where reality has no place: what exists is loneliness, dreams, and madness, mixed with images that are often highly stylized and calculated, attempting to draw us into a world where the first condition for entry is patience. If the viewer possesses the patience the filmmaker desires, they can gradually enter a world that is very much like death. In fact, death is the main theme of the film, intertwined with loneliness, connecting to a broader whole about our lives in this world. The place where these characters seem to have no escape is a metaphor for life in this world, where leaving it can be interpreted as death. Anyone who leaves this place, in fact, dies in the film's world. When the daughter disappears with her suitcase in the rain at the end, the man's dream about her death is repeated, and phrases about her 'death' are heard from the old man's mouth. On the other hand, the presence of death is closely linked with madness and dreams. A mad lover who has lost his wife constantly repeats phrases about a woman who has left - died. This madman seems to be the closest character to this old man; an old man who ultimately resembles him and repeats phrases about the leaving - dying - of a woman. The final sequences share the climax of the film's world with the viewer; a place where the boundaries of dreams, madness, and death blend together and become indistinguishable. The old man tries to bury himself in the ground, then instead of a horse, he is pulling a cart that resembles the cart of death. Ultimately, we see him next to his burned house, which recalls a kind of purification (preparing for death? while the exaggerated presence of all characters in the rain in many scenes of the film recalls this purification) and is, of course, a clear homage to the last scene of sacrifice, made by Andrei Tarkovsky, which seems to be the second source of inspiration for the filmmaker after Bela Tarr (alongside signs of Western cinema - train station, railway, horse - which hints at the filmmaker's interest in a different direction). However, the most significant problem of the film is scenes that sometimes unnecessarily drag on. Although the film's style is fundamentally based on very long takes - which is a correct choice for such a theme - the extension of each shot should fundamentally be purposeful and meaningful. Unlike Bela Tarr - where each long shot is highly calculated and based on a clear reason - in 'The Man Who Became a Horse,' many shots, especially in the first half of the film, could be shortened (including the workers walking on the rails). On the other hand, while the strange faces of the actors add to the strangeness of the scenes and serve the film, their voices - and the way they speak - do not quite harmonize with the film's atmosphere and seem to be an obstacle for deeper audience immersion into the film's world. Nevertheless, 'The Man Who Became a Horse' is a bold experience in Iranian cinema where the filmmaker, free from box office and the needs of the general audience, creates another world that can, by opening the path of the unconscious and shaping a more personal structure in future works, add remarkable films to the history of Iranian cinema.