elsinefilo Review of Two-Legged Horse

Two-Legged Horse (2008)

You won't find the slightest ray of hope in this dark and disturbing movie.

[31 January 2010]

When the Turkish director Yeşim Ustaoğlu's Pandora'nin kutusu (2008)was awarded with the highest prize given to a competing film at the San Sebastian Film Festival,Golden Seashell in 2008 Samira Makhmalbaf got the Special Prize of the Jury. You can google for their stage picture each holding their own prize. Two legged horse must have been screened only on film festivals given the fact that it was only voted by some 200 people here on IMDb.I assume the name of "Samira Makhmalbaf" the Iranian director who got herself a name in the international arena with her previous cinematic achievements won't be enough to make this movie more popular than this. It is actually surprising for me to learn that Two-Legged Horse was shot entirely in Afghanistan though it is classified as an Iranian movie. Two-legged horse is indeed not a sweet Iranian movie(not like, say, Willow Tree) which you will want to see again and again. The abject portrait of humanity will neither make you empathize with the characters in the movie nor will you be able put yourself in their shoes. At the beginning of the movie an old man announces he is offering a $1-a-day work for a clean, robust boy who will carry a crippled boy(Haron Ahad) on his back. He (Ziya Mirza Mohamad) apparently will serve as a walking wheeling chair for the boy whose leg was maimed by a mine in the war. The boy who is chosen among many others turns out to be somewhat retarded and he suffers from a speech defect. Though the maimed boy looks and sounds pretty cruel, the two-legged horse takes all the cruelty to make his living. The crippled boy calls him "donkey" or "horse" all the time. He races him against the donkeys of his schoolmates, he cracks his whip to make him leap forward in these races, he even makes him wash his body in his tub.There is no limit to the extent of the unadulterated cruelty he perpetrates sadomasochistically. Makhmalbaf's script, written by her father, Mohsen does not really give you a gleam of light to be hopeful. From the old caretaker of the father of legless boy to the retarded-two legged horse-everybody is either exploiter or exploited in the movie.Moreover,the old caretaker who sounds holier than thou every time he uses Allah's name in his greetings sleeps with a woman looking like charwoman. No adult intervenes in or pays any attention to the abusive attitudes of the crippled boy. All the school children likes to engage in violent games and they always poke fun at the retarded two legged horse. Last but not least, the most innocent looking character , the begging girl ends up being abused by the crippled kid too. The film ends the way it starts.You need a bit of hope even to portray human nature at its worst. This might have been a great short movie but to display repetitive harrowing abusive scenes, to offer repetitive metaphors like the birth of a colt or filly and to present no flicker of hope,not even a slight one in a feature length movie makes it hard to bear with it. The only cinematic tour-de-force in this movie is the non-professional authentic child actors playing themselves. All in all, if you are not really patient with the art-house movies requiring your patience and concentration you won't just like it.