In close-up, Of Horses and Men (Hross í oss) establishes its fascination with its four-legged creatures, allowing the camera to caress its form. Fur fills the frame to the point of near abstraction, shown shiny and glossy, before the horse’s intersection with humanity is made known in reassuring words; ‘be a good girl now,’ it is told. The relationship that first appears is one of a master and its pet, or an owner and its property; however in a country where both are populous, the Icelandic feature is unconcerned with traditional roles. It is nature that unites the two types of beast, in their similar behaviour most clearly, but also in the inability of man to shake its inner animal or to control the wilds of the world.
In vignettes set within a quaint countryside community abundant with greenery as well as ice and snow, a plethora of parallels are drawn – sometimes immediately, sometimes over the passage of time. Though mankind is gifted with the more substantial story courtesy of the use of dialogue and the nuance of performance, in his first feature actor turned writer/director Benedikt Erlingsson places his subjects on equal footing. His operating missive is plain: on screen, if not in actuality, what’s good for one is good for the other. The original title translates to ‘horse in us’, an apt description.
Thus the film flits between interlinked slices of life that also embrace the earthy traditions of its locale – the colour, the character, and the conventions. First it introduces Kolbeinn (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson, Metalhead), proud of his white mare and posturing to his favoured source of female company, Solveig (Charlotte Bøving, Icelandic TV’s Dagvaktin), until her black stallion does what comes naturally to his humiliation. The tales that follow use the same formula, showing seeming normality, then skewering it through blackly comic circumstances, horses part of each predicament. We meet a drinker with a formidable thirst who paddles his pony to sea in search of more, farming neighbours battling over precariously drawn fence lines, a new couple struggling to overcome their inherent incompatibilities, and a tourist forced to make a heartbreaking choice in the name of survival.
It is the primal that resonates in each short story, as urges of carnality, territory, shelter and sustenance are explored, and inevitabilities of love, sex and death come to the fore. Their manifestation in each creature creates a perceptive contrast, perhaps most strikingly in the appearance of difference but the revelation of its ultimate absence. From the early animal copulation that is played to comedic effect, to the lingering over the horses’ attributes, their sight and behaviour is constantly mirrored. And yet, though astute in its observation, the film remains a humorous jaunt into the absurd as much as a treatise on the tragedy of rallying against our instincts.
Cinematographer Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson (The Deep) uses the distinctive vistas of the rural landscape as a further point of juxtaposition, as calm and still as the equines roaming its expanses, and as treacherous as the people who try to tame it. The stunning visuals don’t stop there, recurrent reflections of the world in horses’ eyes providing picturesque punctuation to each chapter, while every story garners its own splash of unforgettable imagery. Only the upbeat tunes of David Thor Jonsson’s score threaten to enter too-cute terrain, fittingly folksy but sometimes overstating its hand. It’s a minor misstep, though, in a meditation on the various shades of animalism that otherwise avoids such indulgence. Indeed, for all its evident quirkiness, Of Horses and Men is a rare breed of feature that cultivates its off-kilter atmosphere with earnestness, insight, contemplation and care.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Of Horses and Men (Hross í oss)
Director: Benedikt Erlingsson
Iceland, 2013, 81 mins
Melbourne International Film Festival
www.miff.com.au
31 July – 17 August
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