It has been yet another…huge period of time since a live review, but I just noticed that one of our very first movies – Andrei Tarkovsky‘s Zerkalo (Mirror) – is newly available on Kanopy, so let’s do this! I remember very little about this film except that it was slow and kind of haunting, and there were long scenes of windblown grass. Let’s see if that much holds up!
Well the film starts with a kinda-familiar black-and-white scene of Stuttering Yuri from Kharkov undergoing a hypnotism session to cure his speech impediment. It appears to have worked before the opening credits roll to some Bach.
The power lines kind of ruin the magic here
Change scene to a rural Russian house, in color, with a young woman (Maria) sitting on a fence smoking. We are told by the narrator that if a man emerges from the bushes across the field, and he turns toward the house, it is their father. If he turns away, it’s not their father, and their father will never return. From through the bushes near the forest and across the field a man approaches, looking for the way to the nearest town, apparently a doctor. He tries hitting on her, and then he breaks her fence. Then he leaves. What a jerk. At least we get some blowing grass in the field (nailed it!) before he bails and we’re subjected to a Russian poem that was probably better in the original.
Burned a barn on Monday / Soon I’ll burn another
It appears she does indeed have a family – a husband and three children? Their barn burns down. We later learn this is 1935, the year the husband left. Guess that thing about the bushes was right.
Following: a black-and-white dream of one of the kids – some wind in the bushes, his mother washing her hair which turns into a nightmarish scene of the roof collapsing due to accumulated water. The child (Alexei), now adult and living in an apartment, is woken by a phone call from his mother – her friend Liza from the printing house has died.
Switch scene to when Maria was young, and working at the printing house. Apparently some sort of obscene typographical error has nearly – through Maria’s fault – made it into the printing run. Maria has fixed it, but Liza rips into her anyway, telling her that she deserved her husband leaving her, etc. Maybe not a such a great friend after all. But Liza quotes Dostoevsky and Robert Frost, so she can’t be all bad.
Fast forward to adult Alexei, having a discussion with his ex-wife Natalia, and mother of his child Ignat. They’re arguing over custody. She’s played by the same actress that plays young Maria – and Alexei says that whenever he remembers his childhood, his mother always has her face.
When Natalia dumps her purse, she has Ignat help clean it up, and he has a deja vu moment of having picked up coins before.
I like her because she sleeps above her sheets. Four FEET above her sheets! She barks, she drools…
And then, the movie gets really weird. After his mother leaves, Ignat apparently hallucinates some visitors (an aunt and Maria?) who disappear, but their missing tea cups leave steam on the table. A phone call from his father prompts Ignat to transport himself into a war training scene that his teenage father had experienced sometime shortly after the siege of Leningrad. Scenes of WWII, Hitler dead, atomic bombs, the cultural revolution in China, we’re all across the board with documentary footage here.
It seems that we are to accept that Russia, 1970 or so is the “real” time of the film, and that all the prior scenes are Alexei’s dreams and memories. It does appear to be more or less inscrutable, so I’ll basically leave off the commentary for the second half of the film. “Elusive narrative structure”, says Kanopy. Apparently it’s supposed to be the recollections of a dying poet (Alexei, presumably). I don’t know how we’re supposed to get there. There’s plenty of symbolism, but hell if I know what any of it means. But at least there’s plenty of wind in the bushes.
How Not To Be Seen
Tarkovsky, man. I got nothin’.
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 