Kaminski on THE TWO-LEGGED HORSE at the TIFF!
Where one audience member said “I just wanted to say what a stupid, stupid, insulting movie this is to our culture.”
Kaminski here, with a review out of the Toronto International Film Festival... Movies filmed in Afghanistan, featuring non-actor disabled children, and made by Iranian women, I imagine, are pretty rare. Its no surprise that out of that unique sum of elements comes a film that is equally unconventional. Director Samira Makhmalbaf is a sort of Iranian equivalent to Sofia Coppola. Her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, was and still is one of Irans pre-eminent directors of all time, and a decade ago his daughter continued his legacy, bursting onto the scene with her critically acclaimed The Apple. Women directors are a sort of novelty in the western world, and I imagine they are doubly so in the Middle-Eastern world, and its incredibly refreshing to see that even in one of the planet's most male-centric regions, it is still possible for a woman to make a film (even more surprising is that Iran has a rich history of contemporary female filmmakers). The Two Legged Horse, I was surprised to see, is not without its controversy. The film was playing at the Toronto International Film Festival where I saw it. Walkouts began trickling halfway through the feature and increased in the final act. Afterwards, there was a question and answer session with Samira Makhmalbaf. The first person she picked remarked, I just wanted to say what a stupid, stupid, insulting movie this is to our culture. I wanted to yell back to him, thats not a question, but I thought I should let Makhmalbaf speak for herself and allow the back-and-forth dynamic play out. She replied, quite gracefully, that the film is not about Afghanistan, or Middle-Eastern culture; its a film about human relationships, about the abuse and inhumanity people inflict on others in their everyday lives, and could have been set anywhere, but it was set in the Middle-East because that is where she is from. 
The plot revolves around a wealthy legless child who hires a poor boy named Mervais to carry him around on his back, like a horse. Mervais lives in abandoned sewer pipes at the edge of a poor and remote village in Afghanistan, and wins the coveted position of being the boys horse for a dollar a day. The legless child treats the boy inhumanely, cursing at him and whipping him when he walks too slow. He even makes him partake in a schoolyard fight competition, fighting atop him piggy-back style, and sometimes throws stones at him for no apparent reason. Mervais, however, still serves him, though its not clear why. Is it simply a matter of putting up with abuse for the sake of making a living? Has he been conditioned to accept such degradation throughout his life? Or is he merely mentally challenged, as he ambiguously seems to be, and doesnt know any better? (Mervais seems to be well aware of how poorly the boy treats him, exclaiming in frustration in one scene and vowing to quit his job.) The film invites questions like these but it does not provide answers. We do get answers for why the wealthy, legless boy behaves so cruellyhis mother was carrying him as a baby when she stepped on a landmine, killing her and severing his legs. His life since has been most difficult, as one can imagine, and he does not appear to have friends, and when the film begins his father must travel to India with his sister to cure a deformity in her, leaving the boy in tears by himself. All he can do is punish Mervais out of frustration for his own life. As the movie goes on, however, the two boys begin to bond; Mervais helps bathe the legless boy, but finally the boy allows Mervais to bathe himself; they begin to win the fight competitions at school, and he boasts that his horse is strongest; they hang out together in his fathers house watching spiders make webs on the window-sill; he even brings Mervais to the field where his mothers body and his severed legs are buried. In a conventional film, this would become a sentimental piece where two diametric people learn lessons from each other and become unlikely friends; the gentle giant who cares for his physically-weak friend, and the angry rich kid who learns to feel compassion and companionship for another human being. But this is not a Ron Howard or a Roberto Benigni film. This is not a conventional film in any sense of the word. Instead, the wealthy boy cannot let go of his abusive tendencies; Mervais continues to subjugate himself to the degradation, but it soon takes on a more grim twist where the film devolves into a fantasy allegory. The wealthy boy straps a saddle and rope-bit to him at one point; he soon begins renting his horse to his schoolmates for a ride. The boy that the horse defeated in the schoolyard fight says he will pay much more if the horses feet make horse sounds, and so horseshoes are painfully nailed into his feet. The film finally ends with the horse kept tied in the stable with the other animals, and the wealthy boys father returns home with a special gift: an actual horses head, which he slips over the horse to complete the transformation. The walkouts that began trickling around the halfway point, I suspect, have to do with the films stylistic convention more than anythingthough there was a large surge of walkouts the minute the horseshoes were nailed into Mervais. The film does not observe classical Hollywood structurethere is no rising action followed by a climax and a lesson learned, no predictable character arcs where the protagonists undergo a change and learn something about themselves, and no obvious didactic instruction on behalf of the filmmakers. The person whom I was watching the film with, perturbed by the halfway point as she realized the film was not abiding by typical cinematic rules, remarked to me, what the fuck is the point of this film? This seemed to sum up the atmosphere of shifting seats that I felt around me. Indeed, there is no point, in the conventional sense. The film has its own rhythm and styleshots linger and the editing functions not with a practical storytelling purpose but with a more obscure, purely cinematic, characteristic of creating an ambiance and enveloping the audience in the films own tempo. This kind of pseudo-post-modern effect is sometimes similar to what one sometimes gets out of Solyaris or 2001 (though the effect is not nearly as well done, I might add). But what is the film about? For all its use of metaphors, its a surprisingly simple and superficial film about modern slavery, about how people allow themselves to be abused and treated like animals until they cease to be human. The film does not offer much insight into the questions of the how and why, though; much like the overrated Salo, Or The 120 Days of Sodom, the film does not present tough questions for the audience to ponder but simply presents masochism without much in the way of a third dimension. This is a much better, and more digestible, film than Salo, but I couldnt help be disappointed that Makhmalbaf (or rather, Samiras father, who is the films screenwriter) took her characters halfway but did not fully commit to a more psychological exploration; it seems to me that you should go all the way or not go anywhere at all, like in Salothe limbo of Two Legged Horse seems like the film did not achieve all its potential. But the two Makhmalbafs are not interested in profound messages and characters, it seems; Samira made the film independently as a simple expression of perplexity over the degradation of human life she has seen in her experiences. It need not offer a thought-provoking revelation nor a heart-wrenching character drama, but for an audience its sometimes a bit too simple a concept to devote a full 100 minutes to. Actually, the film felt like it could have been trimmed up here and there, and I believe some of the music may have been temp score; perhaps the final edit is not yet complete. I would not say this is a very good film, but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of watching it. Im not sure what that means as far as how I should rate it; the star rating I have given is somewhat arbitrary. But its nice to see a film that exists outside of the typical cinematic conventions. I hope Makhmalbaf continues to make films as interesting as this one, and I hope they are better ones; I get the sense that she is a more gifted filmmaker than Two-Legged Horse suggests. And I hope the angry guy at the back of the theater stays home.
Indeed, I suspect the angry fellow at the back of the theater will epitomize one of the larger controversies of the film, should it ever get wider distribution. It seems every time a minority makes a film, people think that they must be speaking on behalf of every minority of the same class; an Iranian filmmaker must be cautious because he or she represents Iran; a woman must be cautious because he or she represents women filmmakers; etc. Its a narrow-minded political view that insults the filmmakers themselves by ignoring the actual work of art they have created in favor of viewing it in the context of politics. In this case, Makhmalbaf has made a unique and personal film that, to place it in this political perspective, is to totally lose sense of what the film actually is about.
The plot revolves around a wealthy legless child who hires a poor boy named Mervais to carry him around on his back, like a horse. Mervais lives in abandoned sewer pipes at the edge of a poor and remote village in Afghanistan, and wins the coveted position of being the boys horse for a dollar a day. The legless child treats the boy inhumanely, cursing at him and whipping him when he walks too slow. He even makes him partake in a schoolyard fight competition, fighting atop him piggy-back style, and sometimes throws stones at him for no apparent reason. Mervais, however, still serves him, though its not clear why. Is it simply a matter of putting up with abuse for the sake of making a living? Has he been conditioned to accept such degradation throughout his life? Or is he merely mentally challenged, as he ambiguously seems to be, and doesnt know any better? (Mervais seems to be well aware of how poorly the boy treats him, exclaiming in frustration in one scene and vowing to quit his job.) The film invites questions like these but it does not provide answers. We do get answers for why the wealthy, legless boy behaves so cruellyhis mother was carrying him as a baby when she stepped on a landmine, killing her and severing his legs. His life since has been most difficult, as one can imagine, and he does not appear to have friends, and when the film begins his father must travel to India with his sister to cure a deformity in her, leaving the boy in tears by himself. All he can do is punish Mervais out of frustration for his own life. As the movie goes on, however, the two boys begin to bond; Mervais helps bathe the legless boy, but finally the boy allows Mervais to bathe himself; they begin to win the fight competitions at school, and he boasts that his horse is strongest; they hang out together in his fathers house watching spiders make webs on the window-sill; he even brings Mervais to the field where his mothers body and his severed legs are buried. In a conventional film, this would become a sentimental piece where two diametric people learn lessons from each other and become unlikely friends; the gentle giant who cares for his physically-weak friend, and the angry rich kid who learns to feel compassion and companionship for another human being. But this is not a Ron Howard or a Roberto Benigni film. This is not a conventional film in any sense of the word. Instead, the wealthy boy cannot let go of his abusive tendencies; Mervais continues to subjugate himself to the degradation, but it soon takes on a more grim twist where the film devolves into a fantasy allegory. The wealthy boy straps a saddle and rope-bit to him at one point; he soon begins renting his horse to his schoolmates for a ride. The boy that the horse defeated in the schoolyard fight says he will pay much more if the horses feet make horse sounds, and so horseshoes are painfully nailed into his feet. The film finally ends with the horse kept tied in the stable with the other animals, and the wealthy boys father returns home with a special gift: an actual horses head, which he slips over the horse to complete the transformation. The walkouts that began trickling around the halfway point, I suspect, have to do with the films stylistic convention more than anythingthough there was a large surge of walkouts the minute the horseshoes were nailed into Mervais. The film does not observe classical Hollywood structurethere is no rising action followed by a climax and a lesson learned, no predictable character arcs where the protagonists undergo a change and learn something about themselves, and no obvious didactic instruction on behalf of the filmmakers. The person whom I was watching the film with, perturbed by the halfway point as she realized the film was not abiding by typical cinematic rules, remarked to me, what the fuck is the point of this film? This seemed to sum up the atmosphere of shifting seats that I felt around me. Indeed, there is no point, in the conventional sense. The film has its own rhythm and styleshots linger and the editing functions not with a practical storytelling purpose but with a more obscure, purely cinematic, characteristic of creating an ambiance and enveloping the audience in the films own tempo. This kind of pseudo-post-modern effect is sometimes similar to what one sometimes gets out of Solyaris or 2001 (though the effect is not nearly as well done, I might add). But what is the film about? For all its use of metaphors, its a surprisingly simple and superficial film about modern slavery, about how people allow themselves to be abused and treated like animals until they cease to be human. The film does not offer much insight into the questions of the how and why, though; much like the overrated Salo, Or The 120 Days of Sodom, the film does not present tough questions for the audience to ponder but simply presents masochism without much in the way of a third dimension. This is a much better, and more digestible, film than Salo, but I couldnt help be disappointed that Makhmalbaf (or rather, Samiras father, who is the films screenwriter) took her characters halfway but did not fully commit to a more psychological exploration; it seems to me that you should go all the way or not go anywhere at all, like in Salothe limbo of Two Legged Horse seems like the film did not achieve all its potential. But the two Makhmalbafs are not interested in profound messages and characters, it seems; Samira made the film independently as a simple expression of perplexity over the degradation of human life she has seen in her experiences. It need not offer a thought-provoking revelation nor a heart-wrenching character drama, but for an audience its sometimes a bit too simple a concept to devote a full 100 minutes to. Actually, the film felt like it could have been trimmed up here and there, and I believe some of the music may have been temp score; perhaps the final edit is not yet complete. I would not say this is a very good film, but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of watching it. Im not sure what that means as far as how I should rate it; the star rating I have given is somewhat arbitrary. But its nice to see a film that exists outside of the typical cinematic conventions. I hope Makhmalbaf continues to make films as interesting as this one, and I hope they are better ones; I get the sense that she is a more gifted filmmaker than Two-Legged Horse suggests. And I hope the angry guy at the back of the theater stays home. rating:3