Gryozy

This Yevgeni Bauer feature is a carefully crafted and chilling psychological drama of love, death, and obsession. It's impossible to watch it without being reminded of "Vertigo". The story in "Daydreams" is completely different, but the main themes are remarkably similar. Nor is it at all unworthy of being mentioned alongside that masterpiece, as "Daydreams" is very effective in its own right. In fact, the only thing that really keeps "Daydreams" from reaching the level of "Vertigo" is the lack of a first-rate cast.

The story centers around Sergei, a widower who is obsessed with the memory of his dead wife, to a degree that becomes entirely unhealthy. Although the story itself is the main attraction, the cast is solid. Alexander Vyrubov plays the main character believably, without much restraint, but in a fashion that seems appropriate for a character in Sergei's mental and emotional condition. The female characters are also rendered believably and sympathetically. One of Bauer's achievements in this feature is that he creates an understanding for all of the characters, even when they come into conflict with one another.

The highlight of the movie comes fairly early on, with a detailed staging of a macabre sequence from Meyerbeer's opera "Robert the Devil". It's a very impressive set piece for 1915, and it is also a key point in the development of the story. As you see Sergei sitting in the audience, mesmerized by the creepy action on the stage, you can tell almost exactly what is going on inside his mind as he watches.

The story that develops from there is compelling and engrossing. At times it makes the viewer uncomfortable to see so clearly into Sergei's tormented mind – but the story grabs all of your attention, and won't let go. Very few movies of the era tried to tackle these kinds of psychological themes, in which the fear is almost entirely mental rather than physical, and that makes it all the more commendable that "Daydreams" succeeds so well.

The main depiction here is obsessive desire; the recently widowed man stumbles upon a second woman who is the split image of the dead wife. She reclines across a sofa the way the wife does in a photograph he keeps, the flowing black hair - in which love is fetishized - flowing the same way.

It is a short affair, with no more than 15 camera setups and three sets. But the amount of self-referential sophistication for the time amazes.

The second woman is an actress. He discovers her on the street - where the only moving shot in the film is repeated twice, the second time reversing the flow, pulling inwards - and follows her inside a theater. On stage, a chorus of ghastly women rise up from tombs, clearly mirroring the image of the woman rising in the imaginative mind from beyond memory.

So, it is about this living image repeating, thus threatening to overwhelm the first. The man balks; when his painter friend wants, quite literally, to paint her image like he did before, consciousness begins to shatter. The mind objects at this second image, which could replenish lost love, because it clings so desperately to the first. The ending is tragic, implying karmic wheels grinding out a cycle of suffering. The image of the dead woman lying on her deathbed is repeated, except we're not quite sure anymore who of the two women she is.

Such wonderful stuff from the far dawn of cinema; fictional re-enactment suggesting a real flow of events, the reality of that flow called into question by the role of fiction, by people playing roles, acting parts; everything points to the trappings of representation. Mirrors of destructive mind, destructive mind distraught with desire and memory. Yes, Vertigo.

In the theater stage, the actress rises from her tomb with a jet of white gas; soon after, an ominous-looking finger towers above her and does he castigate or warn the apparition? We know by the end, and it was all presaged.