Père, fils

The second film in the trilogy director Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark) began with Mother and Son (1996) focuses on the obsessive, intimate love between a youthful father and his teenage son. They play sport and tousle together, confide in and are everything to each other – but now the son is close to adulthood, it's time to separate.

Apparently Sokurov intended to show that the ambivalence of their lover-like relationship is due to the father's unresolved feelings for his dead wife, but the film is not entirely successful in communicating that. Their closeness inspires jealousy in the son's girlfriend, a neighbour and a visitor, yet the homo eroticism in Father and Son is not just between them, but in the way the camera views other men, particularly soldiers. Although this allegedly unintentional subtext could offend, it does not, due to the hyper-real, mythic tone. The slow pace of the film is offset by a pervasive, abstract sensuality, emphasised by Alexander Burov's beautiful cinematography. Whispering kettles and dripping taps form an industrial ambiance that helps to slow time down and frame the background – a dark quiet house that is as insular as this familial relationship.

Although Father and Son will frustrate those seeking a more plot-driven film, it is memorable. The indefinable closeness between the two men is never threatening. It merely emphasises the similarity between what philosopher CS Lewis described as the Four Loves – storage (familial love), love between friends (philia), eros (sexual love) and agape (spiritual love).

***/***** stars.

Just a short note: It seems that a lot of people don't know what to make of Aleksandr Sokurov's "Father & Son". Though more accessible than the monumental "Russian Ark", "Father" is still a baffling, hard film to grasp. Looking like an archival photograph from beginning to end and lacking a traditional story, it very much resembles a dream. There's a lot of vague poetic talk about abandonment, security, being saved, and such. Largely abstract, one of the few concrete elements of the film is the fact that both father (Andrej Shetinin) and son (Alexei Nejmyshev) are beautiful. Shetinin especially is stunning. It's not unexpected for people to see some homoerotic angles. When a film is this abstract I guess the tendency is to latch on to the most obvious, most concrete aspect. And we can never underestimate the fear—possibly homophobia?—of seeing men getting emotional with each other, much less 2 attractive ones. It's a taboo so strongly ingrained in some cultures that it surpasses the simple fact that the 2 men in question are father and son. It's rare for me to see explorations of paternal bonds on film, especially one this deep so I had to readjust my mindset. If one can go beyond these obstacles you may just see an intense, poetic look into the relationship of two adult men, father and son.

Alexandr (Russian Ark) Sokorov's Father and Son (Otets y sin) – wow! What a beautiful, dreamlike, homoerotic film, and also what a wildly self-indulgent one! A beefy man (Andrei Schetinin), a soldier, we're told, who smiles a lot and looks like Farley Granger (his acting seems to consist mostly of smiling), has a son, Aleksei (Aleksei Neymyshev), who looks like his younger brother but has broader shoulders and an even more spectacularly defined body, and who is studying medicine in military school. The classes seem to consist of manly tussling in camouflage gear. The film begins with a manly tussle -- of son and dad, naked in a bed, filmed abstractly, showing only parts of the body in grainy low light, like the lovemaking scene of the French model and the Japanese architect in the sand at the opening of Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour. Everything in Father and Son is seen in soft focus through a pale amber/gold filter. Everything is beautiful and unreal.

The director has declared himself shocked and irritated by our feeling that the content is homoerotic, and therefore incestuous. There are cultural differences here: one remembers the Russian soldiers in Cartier-Bresson's Fifties photo holding hands in a museum. Americans are over-touchy about homoeroticism, none the less so if they're gay, and one can't question Sokorov's assertion that for him, this is a poem about parental relationships along male lines, about the son's need to break away on his own and become a man, and nothing at all about the homoerotic. The beautiful tussling bodies and the two almost clone-like men are meant innocently as ways of showing intimacy poetically and visually.

Sokorov is an avantgardist, and it's perhaps a bit of an accident that his previous film, Russian Ark, became so wildly popular with the non-Russian art house crowd. Somehow the technical feat of the single take and the variety, color, and prettiness of the images endlessly unfolding in Russian Ark rendered it more palatable to a general audience than usual. His stylistic methods generally demand great patience and openness from an audience. But Father and Son grows on one. It may seem bland, boring, incomprehensible at first, but eventually, if you let it, if you absorb its language and give in to its mood, it works its magic. The movie also has a timeless quality. It may evoke Eisenstein or Cocteau. Its Lisbon setting, also magical, is nowhere and everywhere, a place of the imagination that could be Russia, or Europe, or Baltimore in the Fifties.

Father and son apparently have lived together in a certain isolation for a long time. Sokorov creates his own space. Out of the dark apartments the men leap across a board onto the adjoining roof, where a friend of the son also comes out. The men jump on the board with athletic abandon. They could be gymnasts or ballet dancers, so great is their agility. There's also something incredibly manly about their voices as they talk in low voices in the Russian tongue (which I don't know at all); this effect also was created in Vozvrashchnenie (The Return, by Andrei Zvyagintsev), another recent Russian film that had its own unique mood and look. You walk out of the theater listening to American voices and they sound squeaky and puerile. It's not so important what they're saying; the literal meaning isn't significant. It's a kind of music, and it's accompanied by a muted soundtrack of classical music by Sergei Moshkov that works another kind of suble spell with its hints and portents. (The sound track is unique.) This could be a silent film. The focus is intensely on the visual. The cinematography by Aleksandr Burov is beautiful.

There is a sequence of scenes, but very little that can be described as a story line. There's a neighbor and friend of Aleksei's, Sasha (Aleksandr Razbash), whose father has disappeared (a rhyming and contrasting subplot). He and Aleksei (the son) go down into town and take a long tram ride. In this uneventful film, that tram ride is a big deal: it's the main event, in a way, and the dreamlike, gorgeous photography gives the ride an unforgettable quality. Aleksei and his friend, and Aleksei and his father, stand so close together you think they're going to kiss each other. There's lots of manly affection here: it really is manly, even if it takes you a while to grasp that. Aleksei also has a girlfriend and he breaks up with her because she has acquired a mysterious older boyfriend, although he has just dreamed of their having a child. Abstractly, in these details, the idea of fatherhood and of the intervention of a father in the life of a son are alluded to.

The girlfriend is a bit unworthy in this macho film. She seems a pinched little girl like a beggar in a Charlie Chaplin movie.

These details can only be sketched in because that's the way they are. When one sees Father and Son one realizes that the plotlessness of Russian Ark wasn't specific to that `story,' but Sokorov's usual modus operandi.

The pretty homoerotic sequences in Father and Son recall Derek Jarman's arty and lovely but repetitive dramatizations of Shakespeare's male-love sonnets in The Angelic Conversation(1985) -- except here there is no textual basis, so the movie's relatively rudderless, but also flows from sequence to sequence more seamlessly. Though the message, if any, is that father-son love is a wonderful thing, there's also the son's fatalistic remark, ''A father's love crucifies, and a loyal son accepts crucifixion.''

It's hard to tell at times if Sokorov's film is a big snooze or a beautiful reverie. Due to the plotlessness and the glacial pace, this can hardly be expected to catch on with mainstream audiences. Father in Son is best appreciated not as a narrative but a visual poem. It takes you into another world -- a world you may find alien and yet not want to leave.

This is part of a trilogy. There has been Mother and Son, now this, and there will be Two Brothers and a Sister.

This is an extraordinary film that explores an area still barely touched by artists and other, academic psychologists: the father-son bond, its complexity, ambivalence, pathos, and depth. All are illuminated by the director, Alexander Sokurov. The text is spare; the cinematography is heartbreakingly beautiful. (I have not seen a man's face explored as intimately on screen since Olivier Martinez was filmed in THE CHAMBERMAID ON THE TITANIC.) Every man who has had a father must see this film. It speaks of what Nicole Oxenhandler calls the eros of parenthood but now at the level of the male's late adolescence. Sokurov understands the tension between love and rivalry that is at the core of the son-father relationship. Like the relationship itself, the audio is quiet, with the occasional outburst. Sokurov confirms that a young man learns how to love (women, other men, eventually his own sons and daughters) by loving his father, in early boyhood (which we only have hints about in the film) and then again at the time when son and father must separate. Fathers, take you son to see this film.

Maybe if I had seen the first film in director Aleksandr Sokurov's trilogy, "Mother and Son," then "Father and Son (Otets i syn)" as Part 2 would have made some sense.

Instead, I found the beautiful imagery contradicting the limited dialogue. The camera loves the two lead actors to the extent that I simply could not figure out if paternal love was crossing over into incest or just homo-eroticism.

Andrei Shchetinin is one handsome, presumably widowed father and he spends a lot of time shirtless and working out. Aleksei Nejmyshev as his 20 year old son has mesmerizing blue eyes who understandably makes his possibly current or ex girlfriend weak in the knees by his penetrating stare.

And that's about all that happens.

The lead characters and their male friends spend a lot of time urgently telling each other they need to talk and then staring into space, or down at their shoes, or at each other. They do kick around a ball like such a pair would in American films, but they don't even talk about sports as a substitute for real interchange.

I was sorely reminded of Andy Warhol films, let alone satires of Ingmar Bergman films, but the cinematography was warm and lovely.

At least I got to see some of St. Petersburg and Lisbon, which I think is standing in for parts of St. Petersburg, while they are wandering around emoting and inarticulate. (At least all the final credits were in English.)

The intensity of the central relationship is shown very effectively as they enter each other's dreams, but the repeated parables about father's and son's roles in crucifixion sounded pithier than was demonstrated metaphorically.