Le deuxième cercle

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.

"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 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...

The first time I saw Aleksander Sokurov's 'The Second Circle' was during a festival in Groningen, The Netherlands. During the credits that opened the film I thought it would have been better to go home and have a nap. Not because of the credits, they were as forbidding as in other Russian films, but because of my condition, severely undermined by lack of sleep and by the bombardment of Greenaway's 'Prospero's Books'. Anyone who goes to see a Sokurov film in those conditions runs the risk of annoying his fellow viewers with loud snoring. Sokurov's aim is not to keep his audience awake by providing entertainment. You have to be in the best of shapes. Or so I thought. What followed was one and a half hours of utmost concentration on a very slow film the dramatic content of which can be summarized in a few sentences. 'The Second Circle' is one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen. A son returns to the humble abode of his father after receiving the news of his death. We do not learn who he was and in the same way we learn nothing about the son who has to arrange his funeral. What we do see is a room with a bed. In the bed is a corpse. In case of a corpse there is a strict procedure that has to be followed. A doctor has to confirm the death. The only survivor has to pay a visit to the town hall. A bitch (pardon my French) from the funeral parlor arrives to negotiate the price of the funeral, treating the son like an infant. A coffin is delivered, the corpse is embalmed, put in the coffin and taken down the stairs in upright position. What is left behind is an empty room. The End. As is the case with all Russian films that are favoured by the small circle of cinephiles, you can ask yourself what Sokurov's films are all about. 'Days of Darkness' for instance was a magnificent film, but as a western viewer, not familiar with Russian symbolism, you had to wonder whether you had missed the point. According to Andrei Tarkovsky, Sokurov's shining example, the Russian frame of mind is inaccessible to western viewers. The result is endless interpretation. This is true as well for 'The Second Circle', which has led to elaborate speculation concerning the way in which Sokurov comments on contemporary Russian society. But anyone searching for symbolism in 'The Second Circle' is in my view looking at the wrong film, because Sokurov's little masterpiece is as clear as crystal. The preoccupation with death was already present in films like the aforementioned 'Days of Darkness' and in 'Madame Bovary'. In 'The Second Circle' Sokurov has stripped away the mystifying elements of his previous films and laid bare the essence of our frail existence using minimalistic means. Never before in cinema, in which death is often a welcome guest, has the inevitable goal of human life been lit so poignantly.

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.