Lo specchio

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.

I made an embarrassingly lyrical review of this film in 2005. I now disown it.

I have just watched the film again (perhaps the 4th or 5th time) and have a quite different opinion of it. I now find the film sophomoric and banal. The prologue about the speech impediment I found rebarbative, the bullfighter irrelevant, the lengthy war footage inexcusable, the flicking through a Leonardo book pretentious and irritating, the photography unremarkable (even the signature tracking shot - worked into most of his films - was out of focus here), and all the dreamy slow motion really a cheap trick. Really we could all come up with twenty artsy visual ideas before breakfast. Also I think Terekhova didn't nail the required look after the killing of the chicken as the effect was nonsensical.

Sorry, but there you are. Just to show you how much I've matured in the last 20 years, my original review follows:

(original review) We are talking visual poetry here. For almost the entire film, every square inch of screen is minutely painted. Ordinary criticism doesn't apply, there is no comparison between this and any other film.

So many scenes have you holding your breath in awe. The smallest movement of light is choreographed precisely. A shadow across someone's face, the wind in the trees - these are not simply images of those things, but the ungraspable nature of life, regret, beauty, memory. So much more lies beneath the surface, as we are shown a reflection in a mirror that momentarily purports to be reality, but need not necessarily be interpreted as such.

The film's magic derives from Tarkovsky's surefooted ability to succeed with a succession of intense, beautiful images. He cannot put a foot wrong. Discontinuity in the narrative give the appearance of complexity, but Tarkovksy would insist that the basic thrust of the narrative is simple. The film is immensely personal, and the disconnections only serve to involve the viewer more - we are allowed to fill in the gaps ourselves.

To appreciate all this you need an essential sympathy for nostalgia and memories, for the passing of life, and for regret. You need an appreciation of a silent room and what it previously held, and of nature. You will need a sense of living in a turbulent and dangerous world, where all beauty is transient and sad. You will need to understand how small moments in life can become the most precious.

The film is tragic because, like memories, it lingers. It shows us details beneath the surface and how they can affect us. It shows life in the context of death, nature, the times and places we have passed through. The camera ponders and paints all this in beautiful detail.

Of course, real life is never so rich nor so intense - only momentarily so. The film wants to distil as much of that precious beauty as possible in a number of disjointed moments, coloured through memory and imagination, from childhood through to the point of death.

Apply it to your own life. There is no more than this. (end of original review, which had received 289 likes and 39 dislikes at the time of this edit)

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.

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.

Death. It is a process that is as old and as natural as Creation itself. Forests burn down, Oceans dry out, and Mountains crumble to dust. But such progress is not immediate as it takes key elements to be placed in result. For every action there is reaction, and for every decision there is consequence. And living at the very beginning cannot exist without dying at the very end. Throughout this duality, one goes through challenges and decisions that can be life changing to unimaginable degrees. Life changing in a way that can sometimes be a complete shift in reality. A shift that can be as beautiful as a nearby forest, or as terrifying as a small barn engulfed in flames. This is what I see in existence, This is what I see in Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Mirror'.