Le deuxième cercle

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.

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.

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.

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 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.