Krug vtoroy

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 . . .

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.

Nearly black and white. Nearly silent with long, meditative stretches of somber lingering.

Death writ large on a screen. Sorrow brought home in the starkest of manners.

A father dies, the funeral is arranged and the body prepared, with as much clumsiness as his life was lived and the relationship with his son unfolded — an entire life implied by a film about his place of death and the people that temporarily occupy it during the afterdeath.

What's going on here is simple in a way. This is heavily stylized stuff, stylized in a direction of a dramatic acting exercise, where you have all planes and no edges. This is purported to be Tarkovsky's top student, and there is a trademarked Tarkovsky trick of imposing a miniature landscape, here a village at the end. But this isn't the sort of thing Tarkovsky would ever consider, even if his only film were that mess he made with Bergman.

Tarkovsky (despite his puerile books on the subject) approached films by first seeing a complex fabric, some real, some hyperreal. He seems to have dreamed these complex worlds whole because he is able to express them visually as if they only exist in vision. His films have grand arcs with all sorts of facets that gleam in scattered moments, but brightly enough for you to follow each of the dozens of fireflies he allows sometimes in our field of vision. What you get is multiple abstractions, each one inexplicable but all of them together in motion weave a world as if shrinking a flexible cage of pretended limits can define a real person. You leave his films knowing you have seen real life via music.

This is different. It is visually articulate, but in a static sense. Each scene is wonderfully cinematic and the thing is worth seeing on that basis alone. But these are visions of a stage for a single emotion, not a dream tapestry that surrounds millions of shades of all of life. I know Tarkovsky, and this is no Tarkovsky. Not close, unless you are the sort of Soviet commissar that looks at degrees of abstraction and finds them similar. You leave this knowing you have seen a stageplay that we were supposed to read as intense.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

"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.