Word: strange
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...opening portions of Equus unveil the two recurring images that will dominate the film's visual dimension: a close-up of the doubt-ridden psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Burton) musing about the complex case of his teenage patient Alan Strang (Firth), and a darkness-clothed scene of a naked Strang standing beside a horse, the object of his near psychotic obsession. Lumet fills his lens with Dysart's ruminating face, punctuating the narrative with the Shakespearean soliloquies of the confused shrink. At times, these infrequent monologues border on the histrionic, as Burton casts off the necessary restraint of a film star...
...That boy has known a passion more ferocious than any I have ever known throughout my life, and I envy him for it," Dysart declares to the audience, making an eloquent summary of the dilemma that the psychiatrist perceives as he approaches Strang's case. In the figure of the disturbed boy, Dysart has run up against a patient who matches his own forceful character, yet can identify Dysart's very unique weaknesses with all the insight of one of the psychiatrist's professional colleagues. Strang senses the sexual and emotional impotence of his putative healer, using his instinctive acumen...
...understanding the extraordinary success of Shaffer's work (he also is responsible for the film's screenplay) lies in the fundamental issues of existence raised by Dysart's mental meanderings. In his search to uncover the sources of Strang's obsession, Dysart observes that "a child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave." But the psychiatrist can only throw up his hands with an admission of resigned incomprehension: "Why those moments of experience are particularly magnified no one can say." From one perspective, the psychiatrist's reflections seem a recognition of the paradox...
...expected from a movie based on a play bursting with totem-like symbols, Equus is studded with the type of rich imagery that will easily come to mind with the mere mention of the film's title. Many viewers of Equus will fasten onto the scene of the nude Strang riding a madly galloping steed, a union of man and beast thrown into relief by backgrounds that alternate between the darkest of nights and a blinding brilliance of light. But the segment that qualifies as Lumet's tour de force lies elsewhere, in the scene showing Strang's brutal rampage...
...pertain to structure and language, but Equus' main drawback is its philosophical thrust. Like so many other trendy writers, from R.D. Laing to Ken Kesey, Shaffer wonders whether madness may be a greater virtue than sanity in a sterile modern world. In Equus, madness is personified by Alan Strang (Peter Firth), a pretty, blond youth whose sexual desire for horses drives him to blind them; sanity takes the form of Dysart (Richard Burton), a repressed psychiatrist charged with curing Alan of his antisocial passion. In this confrontation between a virile equussexual and an impotent prune, can there...