Quendrith Johnson

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent

ALL THE PRETTY LITTLE HORSES premiered at the Shanghai International Film Festival this summer. It’s a Greek, Belgian, and German production, dubbed a “psychological thriller” but it is much more than that simple label. As this film opens in North America on Sept. 24 for the Calgary International Film Festival, that runs from Sept. 23 to Oct 4 in Canada, maybe this feature will have a chance to breakthrough to US audiences as well.

While MARRIAGE STORY was based on all the metrosexual conceits of Los Angeles and New York City; ALL THE PRETTY LITTLE HORSES from Greece tells a much more honest marriage story for times of anxiety in the real world. The film, which most recently traveled to Sarajevo in festival rotation, is a necessary slow burn, and this realness from filmmaker Michalis Konstantatos is in some ways as frightening as pop-culture, living a candy-coated lie.

After all, modern heterosexual couplings are an inherent uneasy union between the sexes in this agreed upon convention called Family, rooted in population control, microeconomics, and consumer culture.

For Konstantatos, it’s not just about economics, portraying the actual backdrop of Greek debt and financial ruination, in ALL THE PRETTY LITTLE HORSES he has crafted a controlled essay on the topic of where Western Civilization is twenty years into the new millennium.

Also the title to an American lullaby, ALL THE PRETTY LITTLE HORSES in English ties in motherhood, fatherhood, and every expectation placed on family structures in the current matrix of technology, where the have’s and have-not’s are defined by their busy wired lives.

The premise ties this fraught married pair to some version of the “American Dream” with the requisite jogging Lululemon-clad wife and the sheen of a successful husband with a gorgeous young boy. But they are prisoners in a marriage that no longer functions properly. As troubled parents Aliki and Petros decide to slow down the rush of their lives, and decamp with their young son into a much fancier seaside house to escape, the tension only mounts.

What’s remarkable is the slackened pace does not allay their anxiety. They are unhurried and yet extremely stressed. They exist in a middle-class paradise that belongs to someone else. Once in a borrowed house, their lives take place in a modern glass Frank Gehry-inspired cage of sorts.

In their playacting as Homeowners of this McMansion, their real selves come out.

The wife is trapped by motherhood, and the husband is captive of a dominant patriarchy of which he was once a member in good standing. Will someone be killed, raped, or damaged beyond repair is the question. Which will prevail: the wild horses inside versus their child’s toy carousel with the make-believe horses of Society?

Beneath the civilized mannerisms of an overlay that is marriage, each one reverts to their primal gender roles. And it is in the unfolding of this cave-dwelling behavior, the female tension and male aggression, that the true dynamic inside this painstakingly simmered cinematic confection comes to a full boil.

Take a Look at Their Lives Just Like Our Lives

Expertly portrayed by a stunning cast, ALL THE PRETTY HORSES is a cautionary tale and a fundamental dressing down of the exchanges men and women make for not only comfort, safety, and sex, but for economic power, social status, and peer recognition as the ruling class.

In the end, this picture show also begs a larger question. What have we sacrificed, as men and women, or agreed upon, to live in this super structure where modern convenience has tricked us into believing that basic human nature is not still the governing force of our actions?

The slow-drip pace of this film is another brilliant contradiction laid bare by the filmmaker. In this techno, nano-second amped, Starbucks, or generic-coffee driven fast-paced New Now courtesy of technology, we may not be humanly able to keep up with our own conventions, conceits, with complicated longings for a simpler time.

ALL THE PRETTY HORSES is required viewing, because without any competing perspectives on the full gallop that is Information Age, men and women can hardly be expected to make any adjustments as the inhuman speed of change. Change and deception in the data, that is that tramples the fabric of society, including marriage, motherhood and family.

Find out more from Pluto Film.

This film comes to North America for the Calgary International Film Festival, Sept. 23 - Oct 4., and debuts on Sept. 24 at CIFF, but there are other ways to view ALL THE PRETTY LITTLE HORSES.

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