Le deuxième cercle

You cannot say Sokurov lacks vision. Whether or not you share that vision is another matter.

A son returns to a bleak Siberian town to organise his father's funeral. The father seems to have died alone, friendless, and in poverty. His skeletal remains suggest malnutrition, but the mound of cigarette butts in the ashtray hint it was self-inflicted. The son's emotional response to this situation would best be described as dazed and confused.

Long, ponderous takes predominate, the son stares off into space for interminably long periods, various characters both menacing and comic flit in and out to flesh out the absurdist premise. It is as bleak, excoriating, grey and depressing as all the commentators have indicated. It also alienates its audience and fails to engage emotionally. The so-called comic moments, especially the brutish undertaker and her shouted threats and violence, are stilted and embarrassing (and not in a deliberate sense - this is not the comedy of embarrassment). Cinematography lacks any coherent sense of purpose. The son's feelings about his father's demise, and a sense of his life off-screen are completely denuded from the narrative. The burial arrangements of a man are relayed in fractured, episodic moments that neither inform or move us.

The audience I watched it with at BFI Southbank in London had one collective emotional response to this - relief, when it was finished. A turgid and inaccessible film.

Although this film was made in 1990 it is quite a good critique of the Soviet view of life and (especially) death. It is shot in a beautiful grainy black and white (or sepia and white) with some colors added as in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, Part II. It has the look of a much earlier (1920's to 30's) Soviet film. The film takes place in a bleak Siberian snowscape of a Soviet industrial small town. The young man's father has died and he has trouble making meaning of the event. The frames of the film are filled with things--material objects. They overwhelm us (and the young man). The System treats the dead man as one of the objects, and help lead us to the inner despair of the hero. There's no hint of the 19th-century "beautiful death" idea here, let alone the American tradition of denying death's reality. The idea of a purely materialist world view is ever-present in this film. Probably the most stunning moment in this film has been mentioned by the other reviewers. I won't give it away any further. Suffice it to say that you will know it when you see it.

"gorgeously shot," "profound," whatever.

This movie was funny in awkward moments, and the lincoln center crowd I went to laughed at none of it. It's weirdly funny, because the humor doesn't escape the everpresent corpse. If you're up there with the guy the movie's about, or if you've had a wedgie since the movie started, I could imagine you wearing a sour face or a jaded stare. In the moments were the story felt completely impersonal to me, that's when I found it hilarious.

I like this movie "for the wrong reasons." Yet they are the rights ones for me.

I'm actually watching this film as I write this . . . If the following comments "prove my lack of development as a true, artistic film maker", then so be it . . .

But . . . I thought (am still thinking as I'm presently viewing) that this film . . . to put it mildly, is very, very overrated. Again, very.

It looks like a really, really bad student film done by a someone with beyond extremely limited resources . . . and who didn't pay that much attention to detail.

I don't want to go on and on regarding all the different ways that I find this film lacking, but . . . well . . . I just don't get it (rememeber, I fully admit that maybe it's ME that's the idiot here - not the film maker - for not getting this "piece of imaginative genius") . . . I rented this on a whim because the reviews were very, very outstanding . . .

Sheesh . . .

A friend once told me that an art-house independent film ran in a cinema when- upon the closing of the film - audiences were so enraged they preceded to tear up the cinema seats. Of course, my imagination ran amok, trying to conjure up the contents of such a piece of work. Well,now my imagination can be put to rest.

I am a lifelong Andrei Tarkovky fan and an ardent admirer of his work. I have come across many people who thought Tarkovsky's films are slow-moving and inert. Opinions being what they are, I found this not to be true of the late director's wonderful works, which are wrought with meaning, beautiful compositions, and complex philosophical questions. Upon hearing Aleksandr Sokurov called the heir to Tarkovsky, I was excited to experience his films.

With the exception of the open air ride through the fields (Stalker), this movie has no kinship to anything Tarkovsky has done. It does not seem to possess the slightest meaning, even on a completely mindless level. It's supposedly "gorgeously stark" cinematography is devoid of any compositional craft. There is a no balance, no proportion, and the exposure meter seems to be running low on batteries in the freezing snow. The main character is so inept and indecisive, it makes you wonder whether his father might have been alive if he made up his mind sooner.

I am also not adverse to non-plots or story lines that progress on multiple non-linear fashion. But there isn't even a non-story here. One must surely enter the viewing of this film with a shaved head if one were to exit it with nothing gained and nothing lost, as hair-pulling would be the only possible answer to a pace that could make a Tarkosky time sculpture look as if Jerry Bruckheimer had filmed a Charlie Chaplin short.

I won't rule out that this may be one of Sokurov's stinkers (Tarkovsky's Solaris), but to conclude that he is one of Tarkovsky's heir-based on this film- would be to call Paris Hilton the successor to Aristotle. C'mon guys, don't be afraid to say it. No amount of big impressive words is going to magically bring this corpse of celluloid back to life. I don't profess to fully understand Russian culture and I probably don't have Russian values, but I immediately picked up on Tarkovsky's work as something magical, a treasure and a gift to viewers.

If it didn't have Sokurov's name on it, and it aired on say, Saturday Night Live, I'm pretty sure nobody would "read" all these magnificent analysis into this wet noodle of a flick.