About once a year, I find myself quoting poet and critic Paul Valéry: “Everything changes but the avant-garde.” The reason I’m quoting him now is the release of the new film Horse with No Name by Asaf Asulin, which opens in theaters around Israel on Thursday.
The movie starts off promisingly and features gorgeous images and some interesting ideas, but they remain ideas rather than fully realized drama (or comedy).
Movie plot
Set in the desert, it opens with haunting shots of something that resembles a bomb dropping to earth but which turns out to be a pineapple. More objects fall from above, and then a young man, played by the director, is shown lying in his underwear, having a seizure.
When he awakens, he finds a shoe and wanders the magnificently photographed landscape until he encounters a beautiful young woman (Yasmin Ayun) who claims to have been wandering this landscape alone for eight years. She helps him find clothes, and they eat fruit together, which drops from the sky overnight. He has seizures when he sleeps, and so does she, as they both suffer from recurring nightmares.
Neither of them remembers anything from their previous lives, so they give each other names. He is called Horse, which seems to be a reference to the song “A Horse with No Name” by America, which is about wandering the desert, and he calls her Ice Cream. Those with little patience for this sort of film should be forewarned that this is not the most annoying thing about the movie.
At this point, you can settle in and start to try to figure out the metaphors that apply. Are they like Adam and Eve, since some apples are involved? Or are they the Jews wandering in the desert for 40 years, living on manna from heaven? Eventually, they seem to be back in the city and become lovers there briefly but return to their desert wanderings. Does their amnesia represent the alienation of modern urban life? Could be.
A man (Yoel Rozenkier) shows up, and it turns out that he is the woman’s brother. She didn’t remember that he was out there, too. He is vaguely antagonistic toward Horse, and he disappears and returns. Sometimes, the woman walks around Tel Aviv, presumably in her dreams.
Mostly, though, they talk.
“Dreams are the echo of this world. This is the real world,” says the man.The woman replies, “We’re stuck here. We don’t really have anywhere to go or anything to do.”
At one point, the brother says, “There is no time. You didn’t get here; you were here the whole time.”
The movie was filmed before the war started – its sound editor, Lior Waitzman, was killed by terrorists on October 7 – and was conceived around the time of the coronavirus pandemic. Part of it, I think, is meant to convey the claustrophobia of the lockdowns and the feeling of losing one’s bearings during the sudden restrictions and fear brought on by the advent of the virus.
Toward the end, a radio appears, and the man listens to a radio talk show where someone discusses how he feels he is faking his way through everything in his life. The man even calls into the show somehow but can’t tell the host anything about himself, not even his real name, although eventually he reclaims his identity.
All of this might sound good in a pitch meeting, but it’s difficult to sit through.
Earlier, I wrote that the characters taking the names Horse and Ice Cream wasn’t the most difficult aspect of the film to stomach, and truly, the most irritating aspect is the length. A trippy concept like this might work for 25 minutes, because film is rich in atmosphere and imagery, but as it goes on, the effect is numbing. Spoiler alert: “A Horse with No Name” isn’t on the soundtrack.
