A brilliant eye
Abundant directorial vision and talent on display in “Mustang.”
Directorial talent is rare — even among directors — and when you encounter it, it’s remarkably obvious and yet hard to explain. There is thought, feeling, strangeness and beauty in the first five seconds of “The Mustang,” and within no more than a minute of screen time, we know that director Laure de Clermonttonnere has authority and vision and that “The Mustang” is going to be a good movie.
What’s hard to explain is how exactly such a talent works. We can only describe the result, which is that this director — in her first feature film — has the ability to synthesize emotions and ideas through pictures. She shows you something; it means something, and you know what it means. She has an emotion, so she shows you something else, and you feel it, too.
In the first minutes of “The Mustang,” there’s no dialogue at all. We’re in the middle of the American vastness, the part of the United States that Europeans like Clermonttonnere find so fascinating, and we see horses in close-up, nuzzling each other. The image is not sentimental. It’s not anthropomorphized. This is the animal world, and we’re not meant to understand it. Really, we’re not even meant to be here.
Then the helicopters come, and the horses start running — and they run right into a maze that leads to some fencing. From that point on, their days of freedom, of being horses just among horses, are over.
Cut to someone else who isn’t free, a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit. Roman (Matthias Schoenaerts) is being interviewed by a prison social worker, but he’s a tough guy, so he’s not talking. An inmate for over a decade, he has just been transferred to a new prison in Nevada, and rather arbitrarily — though perhaps with some intuition working in her favor — the social worker assigns him to outdoor duty, which in this prison consists of working with wild mustangs.
Apparently, this is an actual thing. In some western states, there are programs in which inmates work to domesticate wild horses, which are then auctioned to private buyers. And yes, I know what you must be thinking.
You’re thinking you already know what this movie is going to be: Man and horse, both wild and both prisoners, tame each other and become better for it.
What’s interesting is that “The Mustang” isn’t entirely not that, and yet whatever you’re picturing is almost certainly different from the actual movie. It’s not a sentimental film — at all. It’s stern.
It’s unflinching. These are tough people, inhabiting an ugly world. There is no oasis of nature and beauty surrounding Roman when he tries to train his horse, and there’s no mystical bond between them. This horse is a horse (of course, of course) and not anybody’s best friend.
You want to know how creepy the stables are? The chief horse trainer, the civilian boss of the facility, is played by Bruce Dern, who looks like he was breaking horses that Lincoln rode on, which is also around the time of his last bath. This is a hard, mean old guy, who has spent his life dealing with other hard guys and wild animals. And yet, without compromising the hardness or softening up on her perspective just to please us, Clermonttonnere suggests — subtly, but enough so that we feel it — that beauty that can come out of such people, and can arise from such places.
How does she do it? If I could tell you, I’d stop typing this sentence and go make a movie. The important thing is that she does it.
In the process, she guides Schoenaerts to a rich yet impeccably modulated performance.