Parky at the Pictures (DVD 13/9/2012)

Born in the Egyptian town of Ismaïlia on 1 February 1939, Claude François was the son of a French father and an Italian mother. Aimé (Marc Barbé) was a shipping traffic controller on the Suez Canal and a disciplinarian who revelled in a colonial lifestyle that enabled him to neglect Claude and his older sister Josette (Sabrina Seyvecou) and overlook the gambling problems of his highly strung wife, Chouffa (Monica Scattini). Following the Suez Crisis, however, the family was forced to relocate to Monte Carlo, where Claude (Jérémie Renier) worked in a bank and made a little extra money playing bongo drums with orchestras booked into Riviera hotels. Aimé was furious that his son could contemplate such a frivolous profession and severed all contact with him when he met and married English dancer Janet Woollacot (Maud Jurez) and started singing in nightclubs along the Côte d'Azur.

Determined to cash in on the vogue for American rock`n'roll, François moved to Paris in 1962 and placed his trust in manager Paul Lederman (Benoit Magimel), who suggested that he followed the self-funded failure of `Nabout Twist' with `Belles, belles, belles', a French version of the little-heard Everly Brothers song `Made to Love'. A string of Gallicised covers ensued, including `Si j'avais un marteau/If I Had a Hammer' and Marche tout droit/Walk Right In', which `Cloclo' performed with a vigour that soon made him a teen idol.

Initially wearing sequined suits and borrowing his stage moves from Elvis Presley, François adopted a mop top to exploit the popularity of The Beatles and returned from a mid-60s trip to Las Vegas to add a troupe of backing dancers named Les Claudettes to his act.  The  mixed-race nature of this combo caused something of a stir on French television, just as François's fling with yé-yé starlet France Gall (Joséphine Japy) briefly dominated the headlines. Yet, in spite of his womanising and controlling monomania, he remained peerlessly popular and cemented his place in musical folklore when Frank Sinatra (Robert Knepper) recorded his 1967 hit `Comme d'habitude' as `My Way'.

Four years later, Elvis would enjoy similar success with `My Boy', which François had released as `Parce que je t'aime, mon enfant'. But he refused to follow Presley into cabaret and reinvented himself as the king of disco with `Alexandrie Alexandra'. His private life was equally colourful, as he spent months stalking Isabelle Forêt (Ana Girardot) until he persuaded her to marry him and then kept the existence of their second son a secret in the hope that he would be spared the madness of show business.

Yet, even though he became the first French singer-songwriter to have a fan club and front his own record label, François retained the sense of insecurity that had been instilled by his disapproving father and Emilio-Siri and co-scenarist Julien Rappeneau make much of the notion that every career development was the consequence of an off-stage incident that reinforced Cloclo's determination to prove Aimé and his other detractors wrong. Yet, having spent so much time charting his cliché-strewn progress, the writers rather rush through his final years, when François survived both an IRA bomb blast in London and an attempted gangland hit. But they do succeed in capturing the simple poignancy of his passing at the age of 39 on 11 March 1978, when he accidentally electrocuted himself in his Paris apartment while trying to straighten a light fitting while standing in a half-filled bathtub.

Having polarised French critical opinion, this handsome, slick, but doggedly linear outline is likely to get an equally mixed response in the UK. Following a gala show at the Royal Albert Hall and a BBC special, François (who sold 67 million records) was just starting to make his name here when he died. But, while those who know little or nothing about his career are likely to find this account both comprehensive and compelling, those more au fait with the man, his myth and his mistresses will probably be less engrossed, especially as Emilio-Siri sticks to the facts and offers few insights into what made François tick personally and professionally or how he managed to detect changes in taste and know precisely how to adapt himself to them.

Philippe Chiffre's production design is as splendidly authentic as Mimi Lempicka's costumes and Giovanni Fiore-Coltellacci's widescreen photography, while Alexandre Desplat's score provides a soulful accompaniment to the songtrack. Considering he is better known for explosive action flicks like Nid de guêpes (2002), Hostage (2005) and Intimate Enemy (2007), it's easy to forget that Emilio-Siri started out making pop videos and he handles the musical sequences with a quiet confidence that acknowledges their kitsch value without adding a parodic subtext. He might have been less soap operatic in staging the dramatic exchanges, but he gets the best out of a fine ensemble and coaxes a stellar turn out of Renier, who had never sung or danced at all before accepting the role of an ex-pat brat (like his contemporary Cliff Richard) who refused to be bound by French cultural snobbery and taught the baby boom generation to swing.

The 1960s also provides the setting for one of the two stories that rather archly overlap in the concluding stages of Jean-Marc Vallée's Café de Flore, which takes its title from a track by British electro-musician Matthew Herbert (aka Doktor Rockit) rather than the legendary Art Deco watering hole at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain, which was frequented by such esteemed writers and thinkers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. Clearly, the coincidence is intended to entice and prepare the viewer for the reveal in a photograph at the end of the credits that is supposed to prove that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. But, while it's a bold conceit, this variation on the Quebecois auteur's 2005 gem C.R.A.Z.Y. lacks both the complexity and the conviction to succeed.

A brief Montreal prologue shows globe-trotting fortysomething DJ Kevin Parent enjoying some time with teenage daughters Joanny Corbeil-Picher and Rosalie Fortier and his new lover, Evelyn Brochau before the action switches back to Paris in 1969, as hairdresser Vanessa Paradis is abandoned by her husband and left to care for their seven year-old Down Syndrome son Marin Gerrier. Despite being strapped for cash, Paradis is determined to give Gerrier a proper education and is initially delighted when he makes friends at school with Alice Dubois, who is afflicted with the same chromosomal condition. However, the close the children grow, the more envious Paradis becomes and she tries to drive them apart.

Back in the present, Parent is telling wife Hélène Florent about Brochu and explaining how he needs her to let him go so that he has sufficient time to make the most of his fresh start. Crushed by his infidelity and upset by what she perceives to be the betrayal of their daughters, Florent starts having nightmares about being in a car speeding through the streets of Paris and, ignoring the scepticism of her friend Evelyne de la Chenelière, she consults medium Emmanuelle Beaugrand-Champagne in the hope of finding an explanation for such vivid visions.

Somewhat surprisingly, Florent learns that she is the reincarnation of Paradis, who became so tormented by Gerrier's affection for Dubois that she killed all three of them in a car crash. Suddenly aware that she has an option to atone for Paradis's desperate measure and give them both closure, she tells Parent that she approves of his relationship with Brochu and wishes them every happiness. However, judging by a shot of a plane exploding in the sky, it would seem that their bliss is short-lived.

It would be very easy to dismiss this contrived scenario as melodramatic hokum that seems designed to condone a decision taken in the throes of a mid-life crisis to abandon a devoted wife and mother for a younger tattooed blonde who is better for an ageing DJ's street cred. But Vallée makes astute use of music and imagery to question whether we can actually live to the full when we spend so much time treasuring the memory of moments that we eventually forget the significance of the moment itself. Similarly, by showing Parent mixing tracks and producing something new out of the old, Vallée also implies that the past is never entirely over even as it is being replaced by new presents and futures.

With a soundtrack packed with bands like Pink Floyd, The Cure and Sigur Rós, this is often more aurally intriguing than it is visually. Nevertheless, production designer Patrice Vermette and cinematographer Pierre Cottereau combine to convey the shallow-focus greyness of a post-Soixante-Huit Paris and make such deft comparisons with modern-day Montreal that is it just conceivable that the flashbacks are actually the residue of Paradis's tormented recollections that Florent struggles to interpret during her confused dreams. Given the difficulty of making such a narrative leap seem even vaguely plausible, the performances are laudably committed across the cast, with Michel Dumont and Michel Laperrière showing well in the minor roles of Parent's father and psychiatrist. But Vallée risks undermining their sterling work with his fussy editorial style and even those empathising with Paradis and Florent may find themselves feeling cheated by the denouement.

If Vallée just about builds on the reputation established with C.R.A.Z.Y. and The Young Victoria (2009), French director Mia Hansen-Løve more definitively reinforces the excellent impression made with All Is Forgiven (2007) and Father of My Children (2009) with Goodbye First Love. Carrying echoes of François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and the criminally underrated Jean Eustache, this exquisite study of love, loss and healing is the kind of sentimental education for which French cinema was invented.

Everything seems perfect to 15 year-old Lola Créton in the winter of 1999, as she is passionately in love with Sebastian Urzendowsky, who is four years her senior and seemingly as besotted as she is. However, during a holiday at the Ardèche home of her parents (Valérie Bonneton and Serge Renko), Urzendowsky springs the news that he is going on a 10-month expedition to South America. He  promises to write, but the letters soon dry up and he only renews contact from Peru to terminate the relationship. Distraught, Créton takes an overdose, but survives to cut her hair short and devote herself to her studies.

By 2003, Créton is at university studying architecture. She goes on dates and even invites one chap back to her apartment, although she decides against sleeping with him. Despite having talent, she struggles to impress her main tutor. But Danish professor Magne-Håvard Brekke is more encouraging and Créton grows close to him during a field trip and seems finally to have washed away her regrets during a bracing swim in the Baltic Sea.

Four years later, however, Créton bumps into Urzendowsky's mother and learns that he is living in Marseilles. Despite living with Brekke, she contacts her first love and only a rail strike prevents her from travelling south to meet him. Shortly afterwards, Créton discovers she is pregnant, but miscarries and seeks solace in Urzendowsky. However, his reluctance to commit remains strong and he breaks up with her again. Créton takes Brekke to the Ardèche, where she realises how fortunate she is to have found him when the straw hat Urzendowsky had given her floats away down the Loire.

Divided into three segments, the story is constructed from subtly conveyed details that emphasise the simple human truths in what otherwise might be mistaken for clichés. There may be a shortage of social context, while, as with Delaporte, the symbolism is sometimes cumbersome (most notably in a blissful horse-riding sequence and Créton's various aquatic experiences). Furthermore, the dialogue occasionally strives too self-consciously for that teasing intensity that became a trademark of Eric Rohmer's dissections of young love. However, the performances are laudably understated, with Créton poignantly capturing the pain of rejection and the difficulty of learning to trust again, while Hansen-Løve adroitly stresses the contrasts between her beaux by having cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine employ loose, fluid shots to capture  Urzendowsky's restlessness and a tighter framing to convey Brekke's steady dependability.

Amusingly, Hansen-Løve includes a scene in which Créton and Urzendowsky leave a Paris cinema in earnest discussion about the quality of the film they have just watched. She finds it affecting and authentic, while he dismisses it as sentimental, chick flick drivel. One suspects, Goodbye First Love may well divide audiences along similar lines. As might Corpo Celeste. Despite its adherence to the Dardenne brand of pared-down realism, Alice Rohrwacher's feature debut has most in common with Katell Quillévéré's Love Like Poison, with its focus on a watchful adolescent girl's growing appreciation of adult foible, religious duplicity and her own physical and emotional maturation. However, in charting Yile Vianello's struggle to settle in her native Reggio di Calabria after several years in Switzerland, Rohrwacher also considers the social, economic and cultural insularity of southern Italy and the extent to which Catholicism has contributed to its retardation.

She also uses Hélène Louvart's mobile camera to capture the dispiriting landscape and Vianello's quizzical perspective, as she seeks to find contemporary relevance in priest Salvatore Cantalupo's teachings and tries to make sense of her relationship with that unknowable man hanging on a cross.

Just turned 13 and virtually a stranger to her sisters, Vianello is struggling to adapt to life in the boot of Italy after relocating with her ailing mother Anita Caprioli, who is usually so exhausted by her exertions at a giant bakery that she has little time for her introverted daughter or her insecurities. Accustomed to chic Swiss city comforts, Vianello finds the scrubby landscape as alien as the religious ceremonies she is compelled to attend while preparing for her forthcoming confirmation. Moreover, her feelings of outsiderness are exacerbated when she is humiliated in a catechism class run by the earnest (and desperately unfulfilled) Pasqualina Scuncia, who changes the lyrics to pop songs in a cringeworthy effort to dupe the kids into thinking God is trendy.

Vianello also finds herself bemused by the Fr Cantalupo's conduct of mass and her fascination with him alternately amuses and appals the rest of the congregation. However, the tetchy prelate is too preoccupied with backing the right-wing candidate in the upcoming mayoral election and his own promotion prospects (with their attendant hope that he might be transferred somewhere far away from this backward backwater) to minister to his flock. Yet, when he passes Vianello while en route to the ghost village of Roghudi to fetch the crucifix from the abandoned church to replace the neon effort in his own rather soulless modern edifice, he offers her a lift and they chat awkwardly as they travel along the Ionian coast.

Perplexed by getting her first period in transit, Vianello is glad to slip away by herself and meets ageing priest Renato Carpentieri, who translates passages from the gospels that Santa had suggested she took on trust and paints a picture of Christ as an angry man at odds with the shortcomings of his followers and the iniquities of his time. Thus, she has plenty to think about as she heads home with Cantalupo. But a bizarre traffic accident causes the crucifix to fly into the sea and makes up Vianello's mind what she must do when the confirmation service starts.

It's clear from the opening shot of the Marian procession over parched terrain and under a road bridge and from the images of despised immigrants scrabbling in rubbish tips for salvageable items that this is a dirt poor community. But, while one might expect faith to not just be a consolation, but also a necessity, the locals are too busy getting by to adhere to rigid Catholicism. Thus, Santa slaps Vianello in class and later orders some boys to dispose of some kittens in the cruellest manner possible. Even Cantalupo is not above pausing a ritual to answer his mobile phone or plead with the bishop to end his penance and deliver him from this unholy place.

But, while Rohrwacher draws on her documentary background to capture the look and feel of the locale and makes intuitive use of Louvart's handheld camera to convey Vianello's watchful perspective, she never quite manages to make the townsfolk (with the notable exception of Cantalupo) feel more than ciphers. Consequently, the scenes of quotidian life feel forced, even though they are supposed to be viewed through the eyes of a stranger (who is interestingly played by a girl who had never previously left the mountain village where she was raised in a home without electricity). Thus, while this is often socially and satirically shrewd, it occasionally comes close to being patronising and as parochial as the region it is scrutinising.

Ambience and milieu are also vital to Austrian actor Karl Markovics's directorial debut, Breathing, which recalls the work of Romanian Cristi Puiu and Argentinian Pablo Trapero in its refusal to be hurried, its authentic sense of place and the manner in which the characters and their actions are always contextualised. Evocatively photographed by Martin Gschlacht, this is a touching tale that eschews sentimentality and easy solutions in exploring the intractable problem of dealing with the past in order to face the future.

Life hasn't been kind to Thomas Schubert. Abandoned by his mother and raised in various institutions, he was sent to a juvenile detention centre at the age of 14 for killing another boy in a fight. No one seems to care what happens to him (his ambition is to become a diving instructor) and his own lack of remorse and sullen attitude have frequently counted against him at parole hearings. However, counsellor Gerhard Liebmann has confidence that Schubert can make progress if he can only hold down a steady job under the work release scheme and the youth surprises everybody (including himself) by finding a niche transporting cadavers to Vienna's municipal morgue.

Despite initially taking stick from Georg Friedrich and his two colleagues, Schubert finds a strange solace in being alone with the dead that matches the hours he spends underwater at the centre pool. He also comes to enjoy riding through the streets in the morgue truck and commuting back and forth across the city, once even responding to the flirtatious questions of chatty tourist Luna Mijovic.

However, Schubert's mood changes when he is put in charge of a body fresh from an autopsy that shares his surname. Momentarily wondering if this is the woman who gave him away as an infant, he becomes obsessed with tracking down his mother. But the meeting with Karin Lischka doesn't go as well as he hoped it might.

As one would expect of an actor who came to prominence in Stefan Ruzowitzky's Oscar-winning Holocaust drama, The Counterfeiters (2007), Markovics elicits fine performances from a solid cast. Suggesting vulnerability beneath his saturnine surface, the non-professional Schubert particularly impresses, especially in the lengthy travelling sequences that adroitly reinforce the distance he has to go to forgive himself and others for his plight. But Markovics also paces the picture impeccably, while his collaboration with the typically excellent Gschlacht achieves an edgy lyrical realism that allows a touch of compassion to breach the bleakness of both the setting and Schubert's existence.

Despite a caption claiming that its action is rooted in fact, Oskar Thor Axelsson's debut feature Black's Game is actually adapted from a novel by Stefan Mani and owes much more to the Pusher trilogy directed by executive producer Nicolas Winding Refn than to real life. Indeed, so strong is the cinematic element here that it is hard to find something that doesn't have a precedent in movies like Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), Ted Demme's Blow (2001) or Jonas Akerlund's Spun (2002).

As the 20th century draws to a close, Reykjavik student Thor Kristjansson bumps into thuggish pal Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson at a police station after being arrested during a drunken brawl. Jóhannesson recommends that Kristjansson contacts lawyer Sveinn Geirsson to beat his rap and he repays the favour by agreeing to search dealer Vignir Rafn Valþórsson's flat for a missing stash. However, as Valþórsson has gone missing as part of a car crash insurance scam, his place is being watched by uncle Steinn Ármann Magnússon, who works for Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson, a drug lord who acquired a certain notoriety for being the first in Iceland to be jailed for trafficking.

When Kristjansson beats up Magnússon in making his escape, Jóhannesson introduces him to Egill Einarsson, the leader of a gang that also includes computer whizz Ísak Hinriksson and Einarsson's flirtatious girlfriend María Birta Bjarnardóttir. For a while, they make an effective crew and enjoy the high-life benefits of their ill-gotten gains. But Einarsson has big plans and cuts a deal with Damon Younger, a ruthless operator who has devised a sure-fire way of importing drugs through a neutral dropping zone.

The going is good for a while, as the gang brings in huge quantities of merchandise under the noses of the police. But Kristjansson is tempted by both Bjarnardóttir and the easy access to cocaine and his increasing paranoia and unreliability results in him being viciously raped by Younger to put him firmly in his place. Thus, with Gunnarsson vowing to regain control of his patch and the cops closing in on a big Millennium Eve score, Kristjansson finds his loyalties strained as survival becomes the name of his game.

Bullishly played by a photogenic young cast and directed with crash-bang panache by Axelsson, this is a decent enough entry in an increasingly crowded sub-genre. Quickly out of his depth, but driven by arrogance and ambition to commit ever-more reckless acts, Kristjansson makes a credibly flawed anti-hero. But Axelsson pays far too little attention to character development as he colludes with cinematographer Bergsteinn Bjorgúlfsson and editor Kristján Loðmfjörð in achieving such hackneyed gambits as shakicam perspectives, split screens, freeze frames, jump cuts and slow-motion sequences, which endlessly draw attention to themselves in striving to suggest the psychological skittishness and latent violence of the drug-fuelled milieu.

French film-makers have been trying to make sense of the Second World War since René Clément released The Battle of the Rails (1946) within a year of the Liberation. Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows (1969) and Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien (1974) hinted at the darker deeds committed by those supporting both Vichy and the Maquis and Jacques Audiard exploited this mythologising tendency in the biting satire, A Self-Made Hero (1996). More recently, attempts have been made to explore the contribution made by women and migrants and refugees in pictures like Jean-Paul Salomé's Female Agents.(2008) and Robert Guédiguian's The Army of Crime (2009). But Ismaël Ferroukhi's Free Men seeks to show how France's Arab population responded to the plight of its colonial masters and, in so doing, reveals the alliance of convenience forged by Muslims and Jews and suggests that the struggle against Nazism prepared Maghrebi activists for the wars of independence that would take place across North Africa in the postwar period.

After arriving in France from Algeria, Tahar Rahim worked in a factory with his cousin Farid Larbi. However, he lost his job while recovering from tuberculosis and, by 1942, he is making a living selling black market contraband to his fellow immigrants. He lives in a room above the café run by Marie Berto and is arrested by Inspector Bruno Fleury in a raid intended to catch Larbi, who is wanted for union activity. Under interrogation, Rahim agrees to inform on the comings and goings at Paris's Grande Mosque, which is also the base of Moroccan potentate Michel Lonsdale.

Attending the Mawlid celebrations, Rahim is impressed by singer Mahmud Shalaby and offers to sell him the doumbek drum he received in exchange for a packet of cigarettes. They agree to meet at Slimane Dazi's Club Andalussia and wind up drinking the night away in Pigalle. Next morning, however, Rahim overhears Dazi warning Shalaby that the Gestapo are beginning to crack down on Jews and that he should watch his back.

Rahim withholds this information from Fleury and is soon afterwards dismissed from his service after Lonsdale complains to the French authorities about planting spies in a place of worship. However, Lonsdale provides a sympathetic ear when Rahim tells him about Shalaby and he explains that the mosque is engaged in forging documents to protect endangered Jews. Larbi is also now working for the Resistance alongside Stéphane Rideau and he sends Rahim to deliver some papers to a family in the 11th Arrondisement. But he is too late and finds himself protecting the children hidden by a neighbour.

This selfless act touches both Lonsdale and Lubna Azabal, who is being given sanctuary as a prominent member of the Algerian Communist Party. Rahim asks her on a date, but she is arrested and executed and he becomes more determined that ever to thwart Major Christopher Buchholz and Gestapo chief François Delaive by not only protecting the Jewish children, but also Shalaby, even though he is dismayed by the discovery that his new friend is homosexual.

Thus, when he realises that hospital orderly Zakariya Gouram (who had supplied him with merchandise) is an informer, he guns him down in the street and helps Rideau smuggle a group of Jews through a network of underground tunnels to a barge waiting on the Seine and even risks his life by going back for the small girl who has returned to the mosque to fetch her teddy bear.

Fast forwarding to 1944, the action closes with Rahim returning to the Grande Mosque as Allied troops are greeting by enthusiastic crowds. He clutches an Algerian flag in the basement where he first heard a firebrand urging his fellow Muslims to treat the war as training for the conflicts to come. But he has not forgotten about Shalaby and he makes his way to the Andalussia to catch his eye in the middle of a performance.

Although Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit and Salim Halali - the characters played by Lonsdale and Shalaby - actually existed, Rahim's anti-hero is a fictional construct rooted in fact. Consequently, he always feels rather blatant in his mistakes and misconceptions. Nevertheless, this is a fine companion piece to Rachid Bouchareb's Days of Glory (2006), which centred on the indigènes who fought with the Free French Forces.

Moreover, it is also an accomplished second feature by Ismaël Ferroukhi, who debuted so promisingly with the generation gap road movie Le Grand Voyage in 2004. Abetted by cinematographer Jérôme Alméras and production designer Thierry François, he notably achieves (on a budget of just €8 million) telling contrasts between the gloomy backstreet dives and the mosque's light and airy oasis of calm. However, while he touches on a number of intriguing themes, Ferroukhi ultimately puts entertainment before enlightenment, as was the case last week with Radu Mihaileanu's The Source, which was also co-written by Alain-Michel Blanc.

As he demonstrated in Jacques Audiard's A Prophet, Tahar Rahim is capable of fierce intensity, but he is too often required to hold expressions of puzzlement in tight close-up, which contrast starkly with the ever-dependable Lonsdale's more nuanced display of deceptive sang-froid. Similarly, too many minor characters are ciphers, with little attempt being made to delve into Larbi and Azabal's political beliefs or the extent to which Muslims were prepared to risk their lives for the persecuted Jews in the days before the Rafle du Vel d'Hiv, which was recalled in 2010 by Rose Bosch in The Round Up. Consequently, Rahim's epiphany feels as contrived as the disappointingly unsuspenseful denouement. So, while this avoids lapsing into melodrama, it lacks an urgency to match its authenticity.

The Hungarian maestro Béla Tarr has announced that The Turin Horse will be his final feature. It's a shame that an artist of such vision and integrity has chosen to retire while evidently still at the peak of his powers. However, if this exercise in `remodernist cinema' does prove to be his swan song, he departs with an intimate epic of grim formal beauty and disconcerting metaphorical foreboding.

The action opens on a black screen, as narrator Mihály Ráday describes how, on 3 January 1889, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche stepped out of 6 Via Carlo Albert in Turin to see a hansom cab driver whipping his horse. Nietzsche was so distressed by the brutality that he burst through the watching throng and put his arms around the creature's neck to spare it further punishment. He was still sobbing when his landlord led him home and he spent the next two days motionless and silent on the divan until he uttered the words `Mutter, ich bin dumm'. As Ráday concludes, the demented Nietzsche spent the next decade in the care of his mother and sisters. However, `we do not know what happened to the horse'.

An abrupt cut reveals what one must presume to be the said beast straining to pull a coarse wooden buggy through a gathering gale somewhere in the desolate countryside. Its owner, János Derzsi, urges it on with seemingly little regard for its welfare and he stables it with undue fuss after returning to the humble cottage he shares with his daughter, Erika Bók. Together they push the cart into an adjoining shed and repair indoors, where Bók helps her father change his clothes, as he has lost the use of his right arm.

They sit down to a simple meal of a single boiled potato each, which Derzsi peels with practiced fingers before greedily devouring with pinches of salt. Bók eats more delicately and begins clearing away after just a few mouthfuls. Having washed up and tended the stove, she sits by the window, while her father takes to his bed. Trapped in a Beckettian dependence, they remain silent, although the wind can be heard whistling outside under Mihály Vig's quietly insistent chamber score, which complements the steady rhythms of Fred Kelemen's long monochrome takes.

On the second day, Bók rises early to fetch water from the well situated across the courtyard. She helps Derzsi dress and he gulps down two glasses of pálinka before heading to the stable to hitch his cart. However, the horse refuses to budge and Bók has to step in as her father begins to lose his temper. They return the beast to its stall and the vehicle to its shed. But, while Bók attends to the laundry, Derzsi's mood scarcely improves after he chops firewood, wolfs down his potato and sits sullenly on a stool to glower out of the window.

Suddenly, there is a knock on the door and neighbour Mihály Kormos enters to purchase some pálinka. As Bók fills his bottles, he launches into a Nietzschean rant about how the endless round of acquisition and degradation will prompt the world order to implode. But neither father nor daughter pays much attention to his warning and they lapse back into silence after he slams down his coins and departs.

The next morning, Bók wakes at the crack of dawn and puts on several layers of clothing before completing her usual chores with the stove and the well. Once she has dressed Derzsi, the camera follows him to the stable, where he discovers that the horse has eaten nothing.  Deciding against forcing it to toil, he cleans the stall and returns to the cottage for his potato repast. However, the routine is interrupted by the sound of hooves and cartwheels breaking through the squall. Realising that the interlopers are Gypsies after the water in his well, Derzsi orders Bók to drive them away. But they delight in teasing her and suggest she accompanies them to America. She refuses to leave her father, but accepts a book they thrust into her hands and returns to read what Tarr has described as an `anti-Bible' for its description of priests closing churches because too much sin has been committed inside them.

When Bók goes to the well next morning, she immediately rushes back inside for her father. The water supply has dried up and their misery is further compounded by the discovery that the horse has again refused to eat. Even Derzsi has now lost his appetite and he pushes his potato away after a couple of bites and sits by the window in mounting despair. As night falls, Bók attempts to light the lanterns. But the wicks refuse to spark, even though there is plenty of oil and the pair lie in the gloom with a crushing sense of impending misfortune.

Bók is roused on the final morning to find her father packing their meagre belongings, as he has realised their only chance of survival is to move out. She carefully places her clothes and treasured nick-nacks in a wooden trunk, which she proceeds to load on to a handcart, to which Derzsi ropes the horse. They trudge off across the blasted landscape and disappear out of shot after passing a tree on the brow of an overlooking hill.

However, they soon reappear, as though they have seen something infinitely more dispiriting beyond the horizon, and return to unload the cart and stash it back in its shed before stabling the horse and settling into their humble home to await whatever fate has in store for them after the storm inexplicably ceases and they are left to subsist upon raw potatoes.

Longtime screenwriting collaborator László Krasznahorkai first told Tarr the story of how the whipping of a horse caused Nietzsche to have a mental breakdown in the mid-1980s. But, while the pair prepared a short synopsis in 1990, it was forgotten as they worked on the magisterial Sátántangó (1994) and they only returned to it after the troubled shoot for The Man From London (2007). However, having had the sets built in a Hungarian valley, Tarr and assistant Agnes Hranitzky had to postpone shooting several times from the winter of 2008, as they required such gusty weather conditions. The picture was finally completed in 2010 and it premiered at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury's Silver Bear.

There is no question that this is a masterpiece. Comprising a mere 30 takes that demonstrate the still largely untapped elegance and intimacy of Steadicam shooting, it combines a painterly quality with the rough authenticity of everyday existence. As in the films of Robert Bresson, Derzsi and Bók (who debuted as an 11 year- old in Sátántangó) behave rather than perform and it's tempting to compare the symbolic significance of the horse (billed as Ricsi) with that of the donkey in Au hasard Balthazar (1966) and wonder whether it sympathises with human suffering or reflects the universe's complete indifference to it.

Yet Tarr insists that his work has no hidden meaning and that his concern lies primarily with capturing the arduous monotony of life. Certainly the daily grind has rarely been depicted so elementally or with such remorselessly precise attention to detail. But, while these menial tasks exert a mesmerising (and occasionally amusing) fascination, the viewer can never escape the gravity of the portents casting ever more ominous shadows over Derzsi and Bók and this gnawing sense of godless dread makes The Turin Horse as discomfiting as it is compelling.