Word: strangely
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
Lurking beneath this tugging and pulling a child to become something, is the most deadly of all passions in Equus, more deadly than the dull, passionless society Dysart depicts. Alan Strang probably wouldn't have been in the world he was if he hasn't been thrust there by a society that pushes people into a frame of being without helping them understand the dimensions of their own roles in that society or of all the emotions they will experience: pain and pleasure, virtue and vice, boredom and passion. Equus helps a little in that direction, and while it could...