Arnon Grunberg

Follies

Lost

"Of horses and men" is one of the strangest movies I've seen in a long time.
Nicolas Rapold wrote in The Times:

'Set among hearty horse owners in ever-photogenic Iceland, Benedikt Erlingsson’s dryly witty “Of Horses and Men” is like an animal documentary, but about people. Life revolves around mares and stallions in the film’s windswept terrain, but the animals’ orblike eyes direct us to the many follies of their owners, who are driven by petty desires and, occasionally, courage.

A crystal-clear close-up of a horse’s eye opens each of the film’s beaded vignettes, which take place in an old-fashioned but comfortable community. A gallant horseman, Kolbeinn (Ingvar E. Sigurdsson), suffers the gross public indignity of being astride a mare when a randy stallion approaches; a tippler swims out to a Russian ship to get drunk on 96-proof alcohol; a grinning Spanish-speaking tourist gets lost and faces death by freezing.'

Read the review here.

I'm not sure if the community is that comfortable. To me "Of horses and men" is very much a movie about passions, tiny and less tiny passions, and about the brutality of men and animals. Nature is still a force to be reckoned with, there's no comfort of morality, only perhaps the bliss of seeing beauty through cruelty.
And in the end there's the realization that it is sometimes easier to love horses than men.

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