As a stable owner and horse trainer I can watch Mazeppa again and again. The things Bartabas does with horses are almost unbelievable and he captures perfectly the extreme and twisted sexual relations between man and horse. The viewer may be uncomfortable with the truths Bartabas reveals, but anyone who has worked with horses, in the end, must acknowledge their truth. The movie begins with the most shocking of scenes, the butchering of horses, and includes defecation and a lurid scene of children assisting a stallion in covering a mare and Bartabas certainly makes clear his own interest in bestiality and sadomasochism. But the most memorable scenes are those of the horses in action, in particular the snail's pace gallop of the gambling scene, which is breathtakingly beautiful. A knowledge of Gericault helps--his drawings and etchings of horses are even finer than his paintings, and he is clearly the greatest French renderer of horses. More specifically, while Gericault's drawings are superficially innocent, an attentive viewer will find that they show the same sort of sexual passion that Bartabas reveals in Mazeppa. Thus Mazeppa is a key both to horsemanship and to the great artistry of Gericault.
