O Segundo Circulo

i'm a student of cinema and i found in sokurov's work the supreme art of a movie. there was a scene in these movie, when the son, uncappeble of givving is father a decent funeral, opens the eyes of the corpse, just to look into them whit a mist of anger and compreension. note that this was the first and only film this actor made and sokurov turned him in one of the best actors i've ever seen...

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 . . .

I'm writing this as an adjunct to the other reviews here, which explain the premise of the film, as well as theorize about its meaning. It's not that I disagree, particularly, with the other (positive) reviews, it's just that I might have a different take on it.

After I watched this I thought about what I had seen. It occurred to me that all of the secondary characters--the funeral director, the undertakers, etc.--came off as utterly real, almost as if in a documentary. Granted the behavior of the funeral director is shocking to my American Midwest cultural bias. But I can well imagine even that scenario as something real in a poor Russian community in 1990.

What didn't add up for me, initially, was the behavior of the son. He didn't seem like a real character to me, until I thought about it for a while. He seems overwhelmed by his father's death. We see him overwhelmed by the minutia of burial details, but he is also clearly overwhelmed by the death. When the funeral director asks for socks for the corpse, he has no idea where they might be, and in his own father's home. (I lived in a different city than my father, but I knew where he kept his socks.) This incident, as well as others which demonstrate his unfamiliarity with his father's daily life, indicate to me that he did not have an intimate relationship with his father.

We know that the father was quarrelsome; he had a military career but, evidently, no military benefits/associations because he had quarreled with, presumably, his comrades or his superiors. Perhaps the father and son had argued and become distant. If not, a military career often takes a man away from home; that would be another reason why the son might not have been close to his father.

We certainly don't have any sense that he loved his father. What we see, it seems to me, is regret, and, perhaps, distaste for the way his father lived. I believe what we are seeing here is a story of a man who had a far from ideal relationship with his father. He is attempting to evaluate and assess their relationship. But he is as clumsy doing that as he is dealing with the business and bureaucracy of death.

I see each scene in the film as metaphors for different aspects of their relationship. Emotionally empty, distaste, confusion, quarrelsome, embalmed (static), and, finally, awkward.

A mesmerizing, devastating study of grief, Sokurov's film definitely shows the influence of Tarkovsky, but Rembrandt's presence looms as well. The film is shot in EXTREME high contrast with colors so muted it often appears a bronzed black-and-white. People and surroundings just tenuously emerge into light suggesting the 'thinness" of everyday reality and the insubstantiality of life (images are given a two-dimensional quality) when we are suddenly placed in the omni-presence of death. As our experience of the stability and certainty of life is distanced so too our connection to its movement and flow is lost. Certainty of purpose and even of identity slip from our hands. We lose the "why" of any action. We are transfixed by inertia. This is transcendently illustrated in the scene where the young man stares into his dead father's eyes. Perhaps the character, while trying to incorporate the reality of this death, is also searching for who he NOW is since he is no longer the son of THIS man. What I am trying to say in more basic terms is that this film expresses the sense of everlasting loss and the sudden awareness of our own mortality and evanescence, brought on by a death of someone we love (or are tied to), in a more profound way than almost any work of art I have encountered.

As another commentator stated, the vision here is crystal clear. No action here SIGNIFIES anything else. Each is given its own substantive weight (how can a man folding up his dead father's bedding signify anything larger or more resonate than that experience itself, if it is presented in its fullness?). Sokurov's effort is to find the moments of immutable truth glimpsed within an ever-shifting human context and consciousness. His work is a lyrical extension of Tarkovsky's effort to capture elemental truths into by eliminating or minimizing context. Thus sound, in particular, is tightly controlled; limited solely to those effects which accent the character's (and our) experience. Idiosyncrasies of buildings and landscapes are virtually eliminated. Individual characteristics and peculiarities of personality are lost in the shadows. The effect is to give us the singular and universal experience of human grief and loss (if that makes any sense). It is interesting to note that the slightest play with the dream-scapes or grotesqueries that this situation could easily conjure would put us squarely in the land of David Lynch's ERASERHEAD, which this film resembles in the materials used its construction (photography, sound, pacing, etc.). Sokhurov, however, is more formally disciplined, and appears more focused on illuminating the waking truths that shape our dreams than animating the dream truths that color our consciousness.

Sorry about the purple (film school) prose but it's very difficult to discuss this film in other terms.

"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.