Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975, USSR, 108mins, Eng. subtitles
Cast: Margarita Terekhova, Ignat Daniltsev, Innokenti Smoktunovsky
This is an extraordinary piece of cinema from an extraordinary cineaste. Thirty years after its original release, Andrei Tarkovsky's beguiling memory quilt remains as uncompromisingly enigmatic as it is profoundly moving. It is a testament to the craft and vision of its creator, that, even for a modern audience well-accustomed to non-linear narratives and stylistic obscurity, Mirror retains the power to stun, bewilder and entrance.
A stranger stands in a field as gusts of wind ruffle the long grass about him; a barn is ablaze in the rain; a sparrow lands on the cap of a young boy in the snow; a woman leans over a washtub, her hair splayed like a web across the water's surface. These are just a few of the many haunting images that permeate Mirror, a film built around set pieces of such astonishing visual beauty that the experience of watching them is akin to that of being drawn into a great painting. The images seem to speak not only for themselves but to each other, mingling like colours across the filmmaker's canvas. Certain key images recur again and again - rain, fire, wind, birds, woman, child - but, more than this, the visual world of the film is imbued with a tender nostalgia and innocence, warming to a half-forgotten childhood.
The unifying element is Aleksei - his dreams and memories provide the narrative thread. The dreamlike chronology flips seamlessly (and often imperceptibly) between the years before World War II and the unspecified 'present'. The earlier period centres on the child Aleksei and his mother living on a small, summer farm in the country, waiting for a father who never arrives, except in daydreams. (We see glimpses of Alexei's father but he does not speak - until the very end.) In the later period, mostly set in a bourgeois Moscow apartment, Aleksei has himself become an absent father, having walked out on his wife and son. (Indeed Aleksei is visually absent from the film: he exists only in voice-over, or off-screen or on the telephone.)
The brilliance of the film's construction lies in the way in which elements of the earlier time frame exist in the later one and vice versa. Aleksei's mother and wife are both played by the same actress (the beautiful Margarita Terekhova in a vividly resonant performance), while the young Aleksei and Aleksei's son, Ignat, are (like father, like son) played by the same boy. The film shifts erratically from sepia-tone to colour, from highly stylised mise en scène to stock wartime footage, not to denote a flashback or flashforward, but rather to blur the distinction between past and present. In Mirror the present informs the past and the past is reflected in the present: two generations exist side by side (sometimes even in the same shot), overlapping and blending fluidly and without signal.
On top of this collage drifts the voice of poet Arseni Tarkovsky, the director's father, reading his own elegiac poetry: "And I can't wait to see this dream / In which I'll be a child again / And feel happy again / Because everything will still be ahead / Still possible." In the end Mirror is a very personal film, a reflection of Tarkovsky's own childhood and parenthood (his mother also has a small part). In mirroring his own soul, Tarkovsky's masterpiece mirrors that of many generations of mothers, sons and fathers.
Simon Gray
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