Xun Ma
Tao Gu
Canada, China | 2017 | 124 min
World premiere
Language : Chinese
Subtitles : English, French
Tao and Dong promised each other they’d return to the village where the latter grew up, in Inner Mongolia, before following his family, who left to find better fortune in a large city in Southern China. This voyage is a mere pretext meant to reconnect the two childhood friends, who were separated for ten years. With a rare sensitivity, Tao Gu films this companion, who was lost not only “from view”, approaching him stealthily to capture all of his tragic intensity, his disillusioned generosity. Dong is still a dreamer besotted with rock, an incensed body struggling to find money (he comes up with a jade business which does not work out), love, sex and, above all, to live following his own conceptions of liberty, under the ambiguous gaze of his parents and his “successful” brother. Through this portrait of a hypersensitive soul struggling with a rapidly changing capitalist society, Taming the Horse transmits the energy imbued with hopelessness of Chinese youth trying to find its way between the lost paradise of childhood and a brutal confrontation with the reality of adulthood.
Emmanuel Chicon
