Mãe e Filho

I had completely forgotten about the film until I was chatting to a friend today and an image suddenly formed, unbidden in my mind, and I could perfectly see that wonderful scene where the son supports his mother and her skin seems almost translucent, and all that can be heard on the soundtrack is her laboured breathing, and those wonderful painterly scenes of verdant meadows. I doubt I will have a cinematic experience like watching this film again. Rushing home from work, I went out to meet a friend and see it. Sat in a beautiful cinema that smelled of red velvet, we got to see this film, where just for a second time stops and slows. All that matters is sensation, and beauty, and plot or character just fades away... the most wonderful film, so different and so fragile.

I've never seen a film like Mother and Son and I think I've been looking for something like it my whole life. It is a hypnotic dream, part myth, part fairy tale, a sad reverie. It's hard to tell from critical response what kind of distribution it got in the West unless it was next to none. Obviously, the subject of death is not what they're looking for in Kansas. But in the few "professional" reviews there is a sense of respect about Mother and Son. Even the most negative of critics ("maddeningly slow and self-conscious, the most rarefied, decadent, overripe kind of 'genius' elitist art") remark about the visual and aural impact it makes.

In Barry Lyndon, Kubrick held those beautiful scenes so the eye could luxuriate in ideal landscapes, the perfect counterpoint to Barry's character. Here Sokurov doesn't just pause but allows us to move into the scenes where faces, bodies, trees hillsides are distorted by life. My favorite scene in Mother and Son, is the one when the son decides to leave his mother on the bench as he returns home for a book of postcards. The son says to wait here. And that is what we do in what seems real time. We wait back in the forest with slumbering mother while the camera slowly adjusts our perspective. I wish I had the chance to be with my parents at their deaths. In a sense Sokurov has given me that opportunity in an idealized form.

There is very little in the movies today that is anything like Mother and Son. Certainly the slow movement, which mirrors life itself, is far away from any editing that we normally see. But what is there to prepare one for the absolute exquisite beauty, scene after scene. Because of the slowness, because of the beauty, because of the subject, it is painfully exquisite. One feels, at once, the heavy pain and suffering of this life and its beautifulness. The two seem to coexist like oil and water, pulling one in two directions at once. Of plot, in the normal sense, there is little or none. Everything is about the hiddeness and mystery of all things, all relationships, the blowing of the grass in the wind, a young man carrying his mother, Death. What more is there to say?

The prior commentator went a little overboard. The film is surely not the greatest of all time. It is, perhaps, the greatest LOVE FILM of all time. The beauty of the landscape (note that this is Russia in deep summer -- deep winter would have produced a much different effect - but then the mother is dying, and the contrast between her physical state and the lushness of the fields and forests is necessary to keep one from being overwhelmed by sorrow ) is itself commentary on the beauty between these two. No pretty girl, no surging music, no reasons even for the love. It is just there. Titanic. Not tied to sex or gratitude. JUST EMOTION. The dialog is spare. There is no third person. Though everything moves very sluggishly, this fits perfectly. This is not a movie. It is a poem. Extremely fine too as an essay on what the core of love looks like.

This film is about the relationship between a sick mother and her son. (surprise.) Surely, this isn't for the average viewer: narrative is slow, events nonexistent; the film consists mostly of painting-like "still-lives" with very little dialogue. The mother and son walk along the beautiful sceneries (the film is done on the island of Rügen, by the coast of Germany), approach each other, take contact by embracing and hugging.

Nick Cave, the rock singer, said somewhere that this film is the most beautiful he has ever seen. I agree that it is maybe Sokurov's best: the twisted images of the landscapes, great camera work and almost meditative feeling are something I love to see in the cinema - if nothing else, just as an attempt this is a great film, instead of all the run-of-the-mill "narratives" we come across.

Beautiful. Word.