User reviews

Time has passed before seeing a film that was so heart warming and involving. I have ever loved slow and sometimes annoying movies. But for some reason I wasn't intrigued by the genre anymore (just know one of my favorite is 'Aliens''86).

I started watching it and I felt so charmed by it all. The story is practically inexistent but you won't mind.The visual aspect and how things are going in this lovely and simple way can't let you indifferent.

As some others said it is although sensual and homo erotic. Such a relationship between father and son is almost unthinkable but not impossible. This in fact is not that important seen the poor story 'content'.

If you watch this movie in a relaxed way you will feel very good in the end, especially if you're not going with the idea of expecting great things.

Just a short note: It seems that a lot of people don't know what to make of Aleksandr Sokurov's "Father & Son". Though more accessible than the monumental "Russian Ark", "Father" is still a baffling, hard film to grasp. Looking like an archival photograph from beginning to end and lacking a traditional story, it very much resembles a dream. There's a lot of vague poetic talk about abandonment, security, being saved, and such. Largely abstract, one of the few concrete elements of the film is the fact that both father (Andrej Shetinin) and son (Alexei Nejmyshev) are beautiful. Shetinin especially is stunning. It's not unexpected for people to see some homoerotic angles. When a film is this abstract I guess the tendency is to latch on to the most obvious, most concrete aspect. And we can never underestimate the fear—possibly homophobia?—of seeing men getting emotional with each other, much less 2 attractive ones. It's a taboo so strongly ingrained in some cultures that it surpasses the simple fact that the 2 men in question are father and son. It's rare for me to see explorations of paternal bonds on film, especially one this deep so I had to readjust my mindset. If one can go beyond these obstacles you may just see an intense, poetic look into the relationship of two adult men, father and son.

The second film in the trilogy director Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark) began with Mother and Son (1996) focuses on the obsessive, intimate love between a youthful father and his teenage son. They play sport and tousle together, confide in and are everything to each other – but now the son is close to adulthood, it's time to separate.

Apparently Sokurov intended to show that the ambivalence of their lover-like relationship is due to the father's unresolved feelings for his dead wife, but the film is not entirely successful in communicating that. Their closeness inspires jealousy in the son's girlfriend, a neighbour and a visitor, yet the homo eroticism in Father and Son is not just between them, but in the way the camera views other men, particularly soldiers. Although this allegedly unintentional subtext could offend, it does not, due to the hyper-real, mythic tone. The slow pace of the film is offset by a pervasive, abstract sensuality, emphasised by Alexander Burov's beautiful cinematography. Whispering kettles and dripping taps form an industrial ambiance that helps to slow time down and frame the background – a dark quiet house that is as insular as this familial relationship.

Although Father and Son will frustrate those seeking a more plot-driven film, it is memorable. The indefinable closeness between the two men is never threatening. It merely emphasises the similarity between what philosopher CS Lewis described as the Four Loves – storage (familial love), love between friends (philia), eros (sexual love) and agape (spiritual love).

***/***** stars.

Alexandr (Russian Ark) Sokorov's Father and Son (Otets y sin) – wow! What a beautiful, dreamlike, homoerotic film, and also what a wildly self-indulgent one! A beefy man (Andrei Schetinin), a soldier, we're told, who smiles a lot and looks like Farley Granger (his acting seems to consist mostly of smiling), has a son, Aleksei (Aleksei Neymyshev), who looks like his younger brother but has broader shoulders and an even more spectacularly defined body, and who is studying medicine in military school. The classes seem to consist of manly tussling in camouflage gear. The film begins with a manly tussle -- of son and dad, naked in a bed, filmed abstractly, showing only parts of the body in grainy low light, like the lovemaking scene of the French model and the Japanese architect in the sand at the opening of Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour. Everything in Father and Son is seen in soft focus through a pale amber/gold filter. Everything is beautiful and unreal.

The director has declared himself shocked and irritated by our feeling that the content is homoerotic, and therefore incestuous. There are cultural differences here: one remembers the Russian soldiers in Cartier-Bresson's Fifties photo holding hands in a museum. Americans are over-touchy about homoeroticism, none the less so if they're gay, and one can't question Sokorov's assertion that for him, this is a poem about parental relationships along male lines, about the son's need to break away on his own and become a man, and nothing at all about the homoerotic. The beautiful tussling bodies and the two almost clone-like men are meant innocently as ways of showing intimacy poetically and visually.

Sokorov is an avantgardist, and it's perhaps a bit of an accident that his previous film, Russian Ark, became so wildly popular with the non-Russian art house crowd. Somehow the technical feat of the single take and the variety, color, and prettiness of the images endlessly unfolding in Russian Ark rendered it more palatable to a general audience than usual. His stylistic methods generally demand great patience and openness from an audience. But Father and Son grows on one. It may seem bland, boring, incomprehensible at first, but eventually, if you let it, if you absorb its language and give in to its mood, it works its magic. The movie also has a timeless quality. It may evoke Eisenstein or Cocteau. Its Lisbon setting, also magical, is nowhere and everywhere, a place of the imagination that could be Russia, or Europe, or Baltimore in the Fifties.

Father and son apparently have lived together in a certain isolation for a long time. Sokorov creates his own space. Out of the dark apartments the men leap across a board onto the adjoining roof, where a friend of the son also comes out. The men jump on the board with athletic abandon. They could be gymnasts or ballet dancers, so great is their agility. There's also something incredibly manly about their voices as they talk in low voices in the Russian tongue (which I don't know at all); this effect also was created in Vozvrashchnenie (The Return, by Andrei Zvyagintsev), another recent Russian film that had its own unique mood and look. You walk out of the theater listening to American voices and they sound squeaky and puerile. It's not so important what they're saying; the literal meaning isn't significant. It's a kind of music, and it's accompanied by a muted soundtrack of classical music by Sergei Moshkov that works another kind of suble spell with its hints and portents. (The sound track is unique.) This could be a silent film. The focus is intensely on the visual. The cinematography by Aleksandr Burov is beautiful.

There is a sequence of scenes, but very little that can be described as a story line. There's a neighbor and friend of Aleksei's, Sasha (Aleksandr Razbash), whose father has disappeared (a rhyming and contrasting subplot). He and Aleksei (the son) go down into town and take a long tram ride. In this uneventful film, that tram ride is a big deal: it's the main event, in a way, and the dreamlike, gorgeous photography gives the ride an unforgettable quality. Aleksei and his friend, and Aleksei and his father, stand so close together you think they're going to kiss each other. There's lots of manly affection here: it really is manly, even if it takes you a while to grasp that. Aleksei also has a girlfriend and he breaks up with her because she has acquired a mysterious older boyfriend, although he has just dreamed of their having a child. Abstractly, in these details, the idea of fatherhood and of the intervention of a father in the life of a son are alluded to.

The girlfriend is a bit unworthy in this macho film. She seems a pinched little girl like a beggar in a Charlie Chaplin movie.

These details can only be sketched in because that's the way they are. When one sees Father and Son one realizes that the plotlessness of Russian Ark wasn't specific to that `story,' but Sokorov's usual modus operandi.

The pretty homoerotic sequences in Father and Son recall Derek Jarman's arty and lovely but repetitive dramatizations of Shakespeare's male-love sonnets in The Angelic Conversation(1985) -- except here there is no textual basis, so the movie's relatively rudderless, but also flows from sequence to sequence more seamlessly. Though the message, if any, is that father-son love is a wonderful thing, there's also the son's fatalistic remark, ''A father's love crucifies, and a loyal son accepts crucifixion.''

It's hard to tell at times if Sokorov's film is a big snooze or a beautiful reverie. Due to the plotlessness and the glacial pace, this can hardly be expected to catch on with mainstream audiences. Father in Son is best appreciated not as a narrative but a visual poem. It takes you into another world -- a world you may find alien and yet not want to leave.

This is part of a trilogy. There has been Mother and Son, now this, and there will be Two Brothers and a Sister.

In 1997, Aleksandr Sokurov released "Mother and Son", about the relationship between a mother and her son in a world that had pretty much no connection to them. His "Otets i syn" ("Father and Son" in English) focuses on the relationship between a father and his son. As with the previous movie, it's in a world that has apparently no connection to them, but this time it's in a city. This has to be one of the most mystifying movies that I've ever seen. I will say that I preferred Sokurov's previous movie to this one, but it's still worth seeing. Whether you interpret it as a look at the state of affairs in Russia, or a desire to break away from the modern world, "Father and Son" is probably not like anything that you've seen before. It's not any sort of masterpiece, but worth seeing.

This film is bound to cause extreme reactions, either total rejection or total enchantment. Much confusion is caused by Sokurov's unusually intimate portrayal of a father/son relationship. Rather than encouraging a homosexual interpretation, the film is a meditation on the fundamental relationship of father and son. If the viewer is willing to follow the film's slow pace and the almost mythical story, he/she will be rewarded by stunningly beautiful cinematography and a deeply emotional experience. Especially male viewers may find themselves invigorated after watching the film - it's hard to say why; maybe because inside of us, there's a deep longing for the love and life-force of the father.

From a plot and movement standpoint, this movie was terrible. I found myself looking at the clock in theater hoping it would end and relieved after 80 long minutes that it mercifully did. Basically, five characters appear in the movie, A Son & Father, son's girl friend, and two male characters of the son's age who appear and then disappear without context or explanation. The movie and scenes seemed to suggest homo-eroticism, but nothing ever actually happened to reveal this one way or another. There were a couple of brilliant scenes. At the beginning of the movie, the son's girl friend shows up at a window outside his room and they engage in an odd conversation. The photography and acting lent an incredible seductiveness to the interaction between the two, ending with her admitting to having another man who was "older". End of that story.

As an American gay man, it was impossible for me to watch this film without a great deal of wishful thinking. I'm amused by the discussion (in reviews here and elsewhere) about homo-erotic content. I'm guessing the generally stunted nature of male/male interaction in the U.S. will negate the ability of most straight American viewers to see this movie as anything OTHER than sexual. And that's a shame.

I love this movie and not just for the eye candy. It's an exploration of relationships between males as much as it is about fathers and sons, a topic that is generally ignored in films. Unless we're talking about guys shooting or beating each other up. Men can love other men without wanting to boink them. I wish Americans could grasp that concept.

I have the feeling that this film has a back story that makes all of the interaction between the father and son perfectly logical. The point is, I think, that the back story is unnecessary. What is necessary--and fascinating--is to see how this father and son treat each other. The traditional father/son boundaries are in evidence, but their interdependence has blurred the lines. They're protective of each other, and neither one wants to hurt the other. But both realize that hurt is coming, one way or the other.

Dreams are depicted, but the whole film feels like a dream because of the pacing and the way it's photographed. This adds to the initial confusion about what the father/son relationship actually is. To my mind, this is a good thing.

This is one movie that becomes more, uh, plausible, with repeated viewing. Gay men especially should plan to watch this movie at least twice. Trust me, the first time you'll be completely blown away watching these two sexually magnetic men treating each other with affection and respect in a nonsexual way. This is something we rarely get to see, even in gay movies. You'll need to watch it a second time to "get" the movie, and for that you'll need to be aware that their physical intimacy and touchy-feely relationship is a cultural thing, not a gay thing.

I'm a sucker for Russian films, generally, as well as beautifully-photographed films, and films with non-lineal content. Here's one that's got it all, and with a cherry on top: two accomplished and beautiful actors you can't take your eyes off of.

This film is beautiful to look at, but is like watching really bad experimental theater. The plot (if there was one) doesn't make any sense. But it is very "artistic". Lots of shots of half-dressed actors wrestling and looking deep into each other's eyes. Lots of arty shots through windows and with people out of frame. Mumbling and people wandering wistfully. Lingering close-ups of faces and bodies. By the time you get to the threesome on the roof with the cat, you'll be ready to throw a bottle of KY at the screen.

It is supposed to be about a father and son's relationship, but you will just be wishing the two of them would just f*$& each other and get it over with. If you have always wanted to see bad Russian gay porn without any money shots, your wish has been granted.

Aleksandr Sokurov is as artist of the highest order. Not only does he understand his medium of film as his chosen avenue of creating art, he has the gifts of ingenuity, fresh creativity, and daring that make his works unique and stunning without any of the hoopla of 'experimental' filmmakers: Sokurov honors his humanity and celebrates the miracle of life with every stroke of his hand.

For those first introduced to Sokurov by viewing his extraordinary Russian ARK, a film of such importance historically as well as culturally and artistically that it stands alone: the conception and pre-camera preparation of covering 300 years of Russian history as played out in the Hermitage Museum buildings allowed this master to turn on the camera and record non-stop for the hour and a half of the complete story. The result is breathtakingly beautiful and enormously educational and enlightening - all that one can ask from a work of art.

In FATHER AND SON Sokurov has distilled all of his energy into a quiet, rhapsodic, sensually elegant examination of the relationship between a father and son. There is not much story: there is much being said. A father (the handsome and sensual Andrei Shchetinin) lives with his son Aleksei (Aleksei Nejmyshev - as handsome and virile and tender as Shchetinin) in a rooftop flat in St. Petersberg. The father has had a military career and the son is now at age 19 in military school studying medicine along with his training. The mother is dead and the father and son are closely bonded by her absence and by an amazing love for each other.

Aleksei has had a girlfriend (the incandescently beautiful Marina Zasukhina) but seeing that she is competing unsuccessfully for Aleksei's love for his father, she informs him she has found another love. Another young military student Sasha (Aleksandr Razbash) observes the strong bond between Aleksei and his father and being without a father, asks to move in their flat. Knowing that their time as unified family is limited by the way life passes, the two remain living alone.

Aleksei has dreams that approach nightmares but generally deal with separation anxiety. The father is always there to console Aleksei after his dreams and gently encourages him to pursue the life that will bring him happiness.

And that is really the bulk of the story, simple and short as it may sound. The brilliance of Sokurov's genius is in his means of telling this simple tale. He has elected to film using varying lenses and limiting his color spectrum to the sepia tones that resemble daguerreotypes come to life. His use of moments of Tchaikovsky melodies is sensitive and additive to the mood. His ability to linger over extended physical embraces between this father and son says more about love than any filmmaker before him. Part of the magic he creates is due to the physical beauty of the two actors embracing in the nude in the soft winter light of their rooftop flat.

Some viewers have found this homo-erotic and are concerned about that aspect of a father with son. A pity, that, being concerned about homo-eroticism: the passion between father and son should be able to be viewed on every level for its richness, not for the fear of censorship.

FATHER AND SON is one of the most beautiful artworks on film I have ever viewed. I felt the same about Russian ARK. I eagerly await viewing his MOTHER AND SON and all the other works that hopefully will flow from Sokurov's gifted mind and talent. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, March 2005

The film begins with promise, but lingers too long in a sepia world of distance and alienation. We are left hanging, but with nothing much else save languid shots of grave and pensive male faces to savour. Certainly no rope up the wall to help us climb over. It's a shame, because the concept is not without merit.

We are left wondering why a loving couple - a father and son no less - should be so estranged from the real world that their own world is preferable when claustrophobic beyond all imagining. This loss of presence in the real world is, rather too obviously and unnecessarily, contrasted with the son having enlisted in the armed forces. Why not the circus, so we can at least appreciate some colour? We are left with a gnawing sense of loss, but sadly no enlightenment, which is bewildering given the film is apparently about some form of attainment not available to us all.

Alexander Sokurov's Mother and Son had a sense of joy and love tempered by a setting in an ominous dark forest. The second part of the trilogy, Father and Son has no such ambivalence. It is drenched in sunlight and bathed in a glow of greens and browns. The film opens with the image of two male bodies in bed, their naked bodies intertwined in a rapturous embrace. One is breathing rapidly; the other is trying to comfort him. We think these must be gay lovers, but soon discover that it is a father comforting his son after a nightmare. Though the film feels homoerotic, Sokurov chafed at the suggestion calling it the product of sick European minds. According to the director, "Their (father and son) love is almost of mythological virtue and scale. It cannot happen in real life", and the film is "the incarnation of a fairy tale. Shot in Lisbon, Portugal, Father and Son is not attached to time or place. A soldier's uniform is depicted in the latest style, while women's dresses and hairstyles are of the 40s, 50s and 60s.

Father (Andrei Shetinin) and son (Alexei Nejmyshev) live together on the top floor of an apartment house and have done so for many years since the death of their mother. Their world looks like a sanctuary but may be a prison. It was while attending a school for air cadets that the father met his wife and bore his son, now 20. His son's physical appearance reminds the father of his late wife and their bond is intense and emotional. Alexei attends military school like his father who left military service against his will and wants his son to pick up where he left off. He has a girl friend but there is a distance between them. She is jealous of his relationship with his father that to her appears overprotective and he does not want to give up his father's closeness.

Alexei's father is conflicted about looking for a job in a different city and seeking a new wife. They must decide whether to continue their lives together or independently. The struggle for freedom and independence is mutual but they are held together by a transcendent love. Father and Son is an enigmatic but deeply poetic film about the complex bond that a son has with his father. While the film is open to interpretation from different cultural, psychological, or religious points of view (the film says, `A father who loves his son crucifies him. A son who loves his father sacrifices himself for him'), for me, the best approach is to avoid the temptation to analyze and just bathe in the warmth of its loving glow.

This film was a wonderful experience! I didn't understand everything that was going on but it is so beautifully filmed with such a poetic and touching atmosphere that I've just let myself go with the flow and enjoyed every moment of it. This is mainly around the relationship between a father and his son. They seem very close, and they seem to have shared a lot in the past. Although much is unsaid and you have to imagine or feel it, which is great.

Further more it is very homo-erotic : Sokurov has filmed a father and his son but it could as well have been two lovers. Not that there is any incest going on but you can really feel their emotional and physical closeness.

I was impressed by this movie, no only for the topic it touches but the cinematography..! It is endless beautiful and the colors used in the movie are marvelous. One feels the movie flows with colors and poetry. This is not a normal movie, this is not a blockbuster, this movie comes from a genius mind. The director used so many different tactic to get this from a script to the screen, the colors, the dialog, the actors, so perfectly done that every single shot looks a piece of canvas placed into the big screen. The atmosphere is at times claustrophobic but nevertheless engaging Can't say enough good things about this film BRAVO MAESTRO !!

I consider myself to be a bit of a snob when it comes to everything and although the cinematic experience is more suited to explosions than high drama, I can be very stuck up about films, too.

Not all art films, however, are better than King Kong. I quite possibly would give Kong two stars, double this film's haul.

My guess is that people got so excited about this because it was almost identical in style to what you can see in a play. For the less discerning art-buff, a film that looks like a play is 'great art'.

This film, however, was useless.

There was hardly any story so it relied on high drama. The only drama in this film was whether the cat would drop off the roof or not. So, deep and meaningful dialogue, then? No. Great acting? Hardly.

To be excessively fair: Some of the scenery was interesting, though: Communist flats, city vistas (Petersburg?) and the Soviet trams still in service.

I've seen this film a week ago, it still lives on my mind. It was a beautiful cinematic experience. It was a modern language of Father & Son relationship, by only through cinematography. It was a sensational work, brave enough to starting off with the scene of physical bonding between 2 males (Not homosexual, it is purely artistic expression). How long we've been neglecting the fundamental love between Father & Son. While we are pretty much focused on Mother & Son relationship(Blame Proust for that matter).

It could have some elements can be analyzed as a homosexual content but it is purely how much we are exposed too much and damaged by cultural sensitivity in sexual content in the normal, pornographic movie and lost its pure sense to enjoy art. So objection to all other viewer's seen this movie as homo-erotic movie, the see it again how this is all well portrayed in poetical way.

How two are created their own world under the rooftop apartment under the frozen Russian sky, based on father's full sacrifice for his only son,through his agony as an adolescent young boy who is still not fully grown up as an adult, forming 'love','freindship' and 'independency', yet but still going under.

There are sub-contents such as 'male-female' relationship, which are totally based on emotion and built on the sexual difference and desire. Also there is a crash between 'musculinity' and 'sensuality'. Also, of course 'agony' as lover, and who need to separate themselves from the love to achieve its true 'love' statues.

The camera works and metaphors are the extreme beauty of this movie. The close-ups of actors are exploring emotions. Sometimes not quite in the center of the angle demonstrates their unsettled moods.Also the metaphors such as 'wooden bridge', 'football' and 'wrestling' etc, all deliberately building up the story masterfully.

The music contribute those fiercely beautiful sadness into the movie, and it also reflects their sensuality at the same time.

Men's world is not full of 'muscline' but also there are so much depths in it, as shown here in the movie. Father loves son and son does same. But they need to separate as to grow and give.

I still not sure if there are any mythology injected here, but it's all my guess, so fill me in.

It is a sensation, in its subject matter and also in depth as an art film. Not many films in decent years has passed beyond the expectation in how to tell a story. This film is a proved evidence of what film could achieve a state of art.

This is an extraordinary film that explores an area still barely touched by artists and other, academic psychologists: the father-son bond, its complexity, ambivalence, pathos, and depth. All are illuminated by the director, Alexander Sokurov. The text is spare; the cinematography is heartbreakingly beautiful. (I have not seen a man's face explored as intimately on screen since Olivier Martinez was filmed in THE CHAMBERMAID ON THE TITANIC.) Every man who has had a father must see this film. It speaks of what Nicole Oxenhandler calls the eros of parenthood but now at the level of the male's late adolescence. Sokurov understands the tension between love and rivalry that is at the core of the son-father relationship. Like the relationship itself, the audio is quiet, with the occasional outburst. Sokurov confirms that a young man learns how to love (women, other men, eventually his own sons and daughters) by loving his father, in early boyhood (which we only have hints about in the film) and then again at the time when son and father must separate. Fathers, take you son to see this film.

Among all the films I've ever seen, Sokurov's go deepest into my heart.

One has to prepare some motivation, not expectation, for his films since very often his works offer you things much more abstract than expectations. While willingly sacrificing dialogue as the most important means of information, he guides you into the circumstances by recreating the interactive association with camera, letting you feel his neverland of eternal humanity.

Abstruse as it is, "Father and Son" is a rare curiosa out of simplicity and aesthetics, exquisite yet resplendent.

With the early death of the mother, the father and the son supported each other in a way so intimate and absolute that they were sometimes like brothers or even lovers. The son was a symbol of his mother to the father. The father was the whole world to the son. Life for them was tranquil in a isolated world full of love. Poverty, romance, friendship, truth, communication...all the outside forces were reduced to setoffs when touching the edge of their territory.

The plot is simple. The furnishings are as sparse as in a stage play. All aspects are deliberately limited by Sokurov. Obviously he wanted no distraction for the magic visual expression I already got obsessed with in "Mother and Son".

The scenes at home are mostly still while the outdoor images are distorted. The dimly twilights through out the film hardly suggest any time but drown me in a illusion. The ancient dressing style of the son's girlfriend even tear up time and space much wider. There is no alternation of days and nights. There are only words and emotions. It's fairytale. It's fantasized. And Sokurov never wanted to convince us otherwise.

Though having watched it twice, I still cannot make out certain words are said by which one of them. The father and the son had so similar voices especially in impatient dialogues. That didn't really matter since most lines could actually be exchanged at all.

The father smiled constantly in the film. While his smile disturbed some people who referred it to awkward acting, it carried me into a trance where I thought: "provided with a son to whom I gave so much love suddenly realized the two of us had to be parted, how many substantial reactions would I give in front of his frustration?" The father's smile was the best compromise between his overwhelming love and his son's realistic future. Fortunately, the smile got more and more natural and confident. In the end, they still achieved an fairytale ending.

Putting things to a certain extreme is to look better into their realistic forms. The love between the father and son was far beyond our mundane definition for this word. That's why we feel they were like brothers or lovers at one time or another. We can't even generalize it.

I don't know what's the big idea of others who hate this film. Is it just because it's boring and recondite or is it because they cannot accept a kind of love which is so complicated, heavenly and absolute? I rather believe the answer is the former one, otherwise it's just so disappointing.

As Sokurov said, "In a cruel world, nothing can be accepted but a homo-erotic view." He said it in an interview when someone related this film to a homo-erotic interpretation. I don't think he has any problem with homosexuality and I don't think he particularly meant "this view" in a universal way. I think he was just doubting people's imagination and courage.

In an uninspiring world, nothing extreme or heavenly can be accepted but a self-satisfying view. Those who don't like this film just don't dare to.

about love, choices, past and future. about life nuances and forms of crucification. about freedom and levels of sacrifice. about duty and need to bee more than shadow. about truth and father. son is only his part. behind words, in essence of feelings, on crumbs of questions. but snow covers all. as last song. or birth of a full solitude. a movie. Russian in every cell. bitter, warm, delicate, melancholic, simple, a declaration about small fragments who gives sense of day, space or room.beautiful in a cruel form, profound in direct mode.so many nuances and just a single seed. so impressive and strange. it looks like a flower and, in fact, can be a fruit.because movie is more than pictures of a complicated relationship. meditation about blood and lost, it is ash rain front of close window.

Maybe if I had seen the first film in director Aleksandr Sokurov's trilogy, "Mother and Son," then "Father and Son (Otets i syn)" as Part 2 would have made some sense.

Instead, I found the beautiful imagery contradicting the limited dialogue. The camera loves the two lead actors to the extent that I simply could not figure out if paternal love was crossing over into incest or just homo-eroticism.

Andrei Shchetinin is one handsome, presumably widowed father and he spends a lot of time shirtless and working out. Aleksei Nejmyshev as his 20 year old son has mesmerizing blue eyes who understandably makes his possibly current or ex girlfriend weak in the knees by his penetrating stare.

And that's about all that happens.

The lead characters and their male friends spend a lot of time urgently telling each other they need to talk and then staring into space, or down at their shoes, or at each other. They do kick around a ball like such a pair would in American films, but they don't even talk about sports as a substitute for real interchange.

I was sorely reminded of Andy Warhol films, let alone satires of Ingmar Bergman films, but the cinematography was warm and lovely.

At least I got to see some of St. Petersburg and Lisbon, which I think is standing in for parts of St. Petersburg, while they are wandering around emoting and inarticulate. (At least all the final credits were in English.)

The intensity of the central relationship is shown very effectively as they enter each other's dreams, but the repeated parables about father's and son's roles in crucifixion sounded pithier than was demonstrated metaphorically.

Father and Son is a film about a special relationship. one who has not explanations, definitions or a precise form. one who remains, always, out of words. so, the work of Sokurov is more than admirable. because he propose a translation of so personal links that only a father and a son could understand the reality beyond the images. like each translation, the film is far to be perfect. maybe for the sin to be too abstract or too sentimental or to direct, or too poetic. in fact it is only a honest confession. about a special form of love. about duty. about solitude. about looking of fundamental answers for become yourself. a film about past. about ages. about meaning of life. about the best manner to discover the other as part of yourself and as different man. this is all. the homoerotic references, the army, the ambiguity of relation

The film is slow and maddening with a dream like feeling, perhaps as a metaphor for the unfulfilled erotic but forbidden love between a father and his son. I think the viewer feels the erotic attraction, and lack of sexual fulfillment, caused by the physical and psychological attachment and detachment of the the boy and his father. This is a taboo subject, the young man's sexual fantasy, towards dad, and the father's homoerotic attraction to his son. I applaud the presentation of this subject, after all what male has not had an admiration for a successful, physically beautiful, and loving father, or coach, or teacher. This film explores this admiration at a deeper and physical level which is portrayed as dreamlike, perhaps because these fantasies are in fact only never realized desires, which exist only in unconscious dreams.

Although the film attempts to bring us this subject for both exposure and discussion, the film is torture because the subject is taboo and we'd rather not talk about it, and because there is only a lot of mental masturbation with no orgasm. And that is torture for all souls.