Mirror

If you have experienced Mirror, and by experience I mean much more than just having watched it (the experience may take multiple viewings to achieve) then you will realise the futility of describing or reviewing this film much in the same way as the inadequacy of a second hand account of a mystical experience.

Tarkovsky was a mystic: although his religious beliefs are well known there is much less acknowledgement of his conception of God. For Tarkovsky God was everywhere and in everything, his (its) presence is felt in the rustling of leaves in the breeze, the burning of wood, the rain falling (and falling, and falling) on damp fields. Humans exist as a sea of melancholy within the infinite beauty and wonder of nature.

Mirror is the closest art has ever been to portraying the mystical experience of one spiritually sensitive individual. The second hand experience can never be as profound as that from your own being. But an odd and sad experience comes from watching Mirror, the belief that your own interpretation of the world will never be so deeply poetic or deep as Tarkovsky's, and the world you see on the cinema screen seems more vivid and alive than real life ever will.

Has there ever been a more visually beautiful film than this one? That's a rhetorical question... one that only viewing it can answer.

To try to follow it as an ordinary narrative is to lose its poetic ambience...I let it wash over me like glorious music. We are so accustomed to "and then...and then" that our minds can follow as logic, that we tend to dismiss the affect that the visual image itself can have on our minds, hearts and souls. Tarkovsky is a poet...and for me this is his richest, most satisfying film of all. Included are film clips from WW 2, the Spanish Civil War, poetry by the director's father.

It does help to know that the same actress (Margarita Terekhova) plays the dying man's wife and his mother...as he allows his memory to shift over his life.

The only other director I can think of who understands the visual language of film and its significance as beautifully as Tarkovsky is Terence Malick.

Zerkalo is haunting and uplifting even as we know the "hero" is dying. Death, after all, is an intrinsic part of life.

Spoilers herein.

Many films allow one immediate response; you know while watching how effective it is and at the end are geared for talking or writing about what you have just seen.

Others, you need to spend time with. This -- I am guessing here -- is because the truly great so lead our imagination that we need to heal or grow after the experience and only then assess what has happened. Surely when you are in this film, you know something special is going on: there are some true transcendences of the eye; very dimensional, surprising. Just as you have established the field of vision and registered the one thing you expect to see, the camera moves in an unexpected manner to reveal either a completely extra or contradictory reality.

Those moments thrill, but confuse at the same time because in lesser hands, this would be an excuse for noodling about with the 'story' in a superficially artsy-fartsy manner. Only after some time can you evaluate how effectively this might have slipped between the sheets of your minds. It is a matter of some interest to me how this happens when it does. Is it a matter of the artist knowing us better than we do ourselves and slipping into our dreams unawares? Or is a matter of creating an attractive castle that we are drawn to and inhabit?

Generally, when an artist is called 'personal,' it is thought to be the latter. But in this case, I think most of what he has done is find that universal manner of overlapping and merging that underlies the visual memory of us all. What confuses is the Soviet environment: the intensely uncoordinated industrial environment and the once fine but now dilapidated urban residences. They transport us to a different place: the unfamiliar described in a familiar way.

Surely this is not what he intended: he didn't make this for a comfortable American/European. And if not made just for himself it was for people who shared the same world. So at least as far as the content, we are attracted to an unfamiliar castle. But so far as the 'personal' form, I think he has found something strangely cosmic. This may be the best film (with Rublev) of one of the three most important filmmakers in history.

Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 4: Every visually literate person should experience this.

Ignoring other prominent thematic fields like family or marital problems and Russian or Soviet history (from Pushkin via Stalin to the current fear of a Chinese threat), two topics can be extracted from the movie which Tarkovsky seems to be very concerned about: 1.The confrontation of Man and Nature as two opposing powers, and 2.The continuum of time (the equation of present, future and past).

The importance of topic 2 can be made clear by just considering the film's structure: The different time levels are intertwined in an often deliberately confusing way so that it actually becomes difficult to identify them. The fact that the same actors are used to portray different characters of different time levels (Maria=Alexei's mother and Natalya=Alexei's wife; Alexei as a child and Ignat=Alexei's son) underlines the idea of deliberateness in addition. But the interconnection of times is also made visible by the recurrent theme of the so called 'déjà-vu-phenomenon': A character perceives a new situation or action as if it has already occurred before. In fact, he or she gets a notion of the predetermination of everything that happens in his or her life - a horrid thought, because then you can't change anything and have to accept willingly whatever an obscure determinating force has planned for you.

Let's concentrate on the last sequences in which the significance and the combination of these themes become obvious. First there is the scene where Alexei, who lives in separation from Natalya, lies in agony, overcome by an unknown disease. He just has the energy to make a last statement for posterity ("I simply wanted to be happy!"), then he retires from the world, asking to be left in peace.

But while he is on the brink of death, he still succeeds in wondrously stirring up life. He takes into his hand a moribund bird, which is lying on his bedside table, squeezes it, and then lets it go so that it can fly up into freedom.

Is it the same bird that breaks through a window glass in another scene, or that places itself on the head of that orphan boy whose parents have perished in the Leningrad blockade, as if he wanted to protect him?

The birds of "Zerkalo" seem to take up a symbolic function similar to the dogs in other Tarkovsky movies (i.e.: "Nostalghia", "Solyaris"): They represent some kind of link between Man and Nature; they are frontier guards at the gates of the unknown.

Tarkovsky sees Man and Nature as two opposing, incompatible powers. This becomes evident again and again, for instance when a vigorous wind repeatedly runs through grass and trees or when drumming rain drenches the landscape. Here Man can only watch in amazement, being unable to set something of equal value against the inscrutable elemental forces.

In the closing sequence Man appears at first as if he was embedded in the womb of Nature. Maria, the future mother of Alexei, is lying dreamily in the grass when she is asked by her husband whether she prefers a boy or a girl. But instead of answering his question she is gazing into the distance, and suddenly she sees herself as grandmother, walking across woods and meadows having little Alexei (Ignat?) and his sister by the hand. Then a juvenile Maria appears again, and tears are running along her cheek, but she is smiling at the same time. It seems as if the knowledge of the unstoppable progression of human existence into a single direction (towards old age and death) makes her sad and happy at the same time. She feels grief because of the inevitable loss of youth, but she also rejoices in happy relaxation for she has made out the rules of life as such and has accepted them.

At the end the camera follows the way of the grandmother and her grandchildren for quite a while. But again and again trees interfere and obstruct the view on the humans like gloomy barricades. Until finally both ways separate irredeemably: The humans have disappeared somewhere in the distance whereas the camera shot pans into the dark impenetrability of the forest.

I found this film quite difficult to get into since I'm more used to conventional plot driven narratives, a concept that was anathema to Tarkovsky. Certainly the Soviet authorities did their best to limit the venues where this film could be seen, condemning it's personal nature as decadent, self-indulgent and against the formal traditions of Soviet cinema, a cinema which Tarkovsky himself did not have a good word for. Russians who did see it sent many letters to the director saying how much it affected them and mirrored their own childhood experiences. Tarkovsky himself had difficulty in 'finding' his film during production, and originally worried that it would not work. Many critics questioned whether the images were symbolic in some way, but Tarkovsky dismissed symbolism as decadent. He sited Japanese writers of the middle ages rejecting such things. He had no time for surrealism either, pointing out that Dali himself had rejected the concept as facile. And yet the pull of dreams are un-mistakable in this work. Tarkovsky stated that the artist himself does not necessarily know the meaning of an image but is compelled to express his vision.

Despite some of the problems in viewing this film there are plenty of moving and mysterious moments, not least the wistful and melancholic look on the face of the mother as she lays in the grass, contemplating her children's future.