THE HORSE THIEF review
Another one for the ScreenAnarchy archives – a classic mainland Chinese debut from a noted Fifth Generation director, largely ignored by the mainstream (despite one famous celebrity endorsement) and finally released on DVD two years ago to relatively little fanfare. Why should you be looking to pick up Tian Zhuangzhuang's [i]The Horse Thief[/i]? Review after the break.
[i]The Horse Thief[/i] is a strange beast. Barely a film at all, in some respects; its plot is fairly minimal and vast stretches of the movie are entirely without dialogue, long static or tracking shots through lonely highland landscapes or dreamlike Buddhist ceremonies. What sets it apart from any other filmmaker pointing a camera at rural China? With high-definition cameras and video editing software ever more readily available the last few years have seen the rise of a DIY ethos telling the world anyone really can put together a film of their own given enough time and dedication. Point, shoot, voilà – find something interesting to focus on and everything else will just fall into place, right? Tian Zhuangzhuang's first motion picture proper is a powerful argument suggesting it takes more than a scenic backdrop to make a masterpiece.
The story, such as it is, deals with Norbu, a tribesman thrown out of his clan after the elders can no longer ignore he's been stealing to help provide for his wife and infant son. Norbu takes a vow to renounce his criminal past, but the difficulty of struggling to survive in such a savage environment and unforeseen tragic circumstances mean things do not go quite the way he'd hoped.
This is more or less all the explanation Tian provides – there are several significant additional events over the course of the film but the director seems far more concerned with the how than letting the audience know precisely why. His first film [i]On the Hunting Ground[/i] was a semi-documentary about ethnic minorities in Mongolia and both subject and form would prove to be long-term favourites. [i]The Horse Thief[/i] is shot from a detached, largely objective viewpoint which gives the film a haunting, otherworldly quality at the same time as it sets things out with a dispassionate, methodical style. These people have to go through tremendous hardship, and what happens to them is both terrible and moving but at the same time there's an atmosphere about the film that lies somewhere between inner peace and weary acceptance – a suggestion these things just [b]are[/b].
This detachment lends dramatic weight to even the most matter-of-fact long take of snow-capped mountains. Coupled with the artistry in the cinematography, when it comes to the pivotal moments the emotional impact is frequently huge. The camerawork is slow, patient, beautifully framed, every shot carefully considered; the key images have an almost painterly beauty that belies their simplicity. An early setpiece where Norbu participates in a ritual to placate the mountain deity ends on a storm of prayer bills floating down a valley on the wind. The lingering camera, the endless stream of fluttering pieces of paper against the lonely hillside and Qu Xiaosong's ghostly, melancholy score make the sequence utterly magical. Even something as mundane as Norbu's family bathing in the river pays just enough attention to the play of light on water and the way the setting sun falls on the forest in the background to give everything that much more significance.
And though the 'twist' could probably be guessed in advance (in fact most critical analysis of the film gives it away), the key scenes dealing with this narrative progression are at times utterly breathtaking. The six or seven minutes around the mid-point of [i]The Horse Thief[/i] are staggeringly effective, bringing together sound, visuals, character and theme in a sequence that has to rank as one of the best such marriages cinema has ever produced, period. On the surface it's merely a wordless artistic rendition of grief, but the pacing, editing, imagery and score come together so perfectly Tian achieves more with it than many directors manage with their entire careers.
Despite showing its age, [i]The Horse Thief[/i] doesn't seem particularly dated. To emphasise the distinction, there are few if any effects and little to tie the film to any particular time or place. Supposedly the year is 1923 but other than the appearance of firearms in certain sequences there's little to narrow it down to any specific era beyond the 20th century. This longevity makes it all the more memorable, giving [i]The Horse Thief[/i] a sense of timelessness that suggests the film could easily be just as effective another twenty-three years from now.
It is contrived – about the only real negative criticism one can level at [i]The Horse Thief[/i] is everything is very obviously 'just so', sometimes to the point it resembles an art installation more than a movie. Chinese censors frequently accused Tian's early work of pandering to Western sensibilities (sixteen years before co-DP Hou Yong worked on Zhang Yimou's [i]Hero[/i], which drew similar attacks). Tian accepted the charges, even defended them, and the calculated presentation of [i]The Horse Thief[/i] can occasionally seem weirdly incongruous next to the documentary aspects, but regardless of the motivation behind this it doesn't detract from the sheer cinematic power of the film.
[i]The Horse Thief[/i] will not be for everyone. It's slow, obtuse and distant, with nothing explicitly laid out on screen. What little character and story development takes place is purposefully ambiguous as often as it is opaque. Nonetheless, point and shoot this is not; what it achieves with the bare minimum of narrative convention is enough to put most films released in the twenty-three years since to shame. Hauntingly beautiful, compelling and devastatingly moving, Martin Scorcese famously called it the best film of its decade – it could be argued its success goes way beyond that. For anyone with even the slightest interest in the emotions a director can convey through concentrating on images, sounds and themes over dialogue and exposition, [i]The Horse Thief[/i] deserves the highest possible recommendation.
