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The Criterion Channel Presents: Mirror (1975)


“I can’t wait to once again have this dream in which I’ll be a child again and in which I’ll be happy knowing that everything lies ahead, that everything is possible.”
One of the lessons every movie fan must learn eventually is that a film doesn’t have to make sense to be good. For me, it was Last Year at Marienbad that first taught me that, for others it may be Persona or Mulholland Drive, Holy Motors or I’m Thinking of Ending Things, or just about anything by Luis Buñuel, Derek Jarman, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, or Andy Warhol. Or maybe they stumbled on this film by Andrei Tarkovsky, a nebulous dream of a picture, considered in Russia to be his best.
Mirror was the great Soviet director’s fourth film, made between the more popularly known Solaris and Stalker in 1975. And even more than those, it is a film driven by emotions and images, concepts and allusions more than any solid kind of a narrative. Told out-of-sync in shifting times and perspectives and colour techniques, it’s hard to decipher but relatively easy to understand –various scenes and circumstances drawn from Tarkovsky’s own life, the lead character an avatar for himself, which he illustrates quite opaquely by having present-set sequences shot from a first-person perspective. It is a personal movie, Tarkovsky’s attempt to explore and understand his own psyche –he himself doesn’t fully get it either.
Call it self-indulgence, but the artistry speaks for itself, the unique language that Tarkovsky employs to relate his vision in ways that resonate beyond his own experience. Little visual sequences or surreal details of memory that are familiar across a spectrum in addition to the provocative poetry that colours the film, some by Pushkin and Dostoevsky, some by his own poet father Arseny Tarkovsky, who reads them himself.
The film does have structure in spite of all this, the scenes coherent in and of themselves at relating three distinct periods in the life of Tarkovsky’s alter ego Aleksei, that he observes more often than participates in. There is his early childhood in the 1930s that principally showcases the struggles of his mother Maria, his adolescence during the war years characterized by the evacuation of Moscow relocating his family to the country, and his adulthood in the present where we hear but never see Aleksei, but observe his ex-wife Natalia and his young son Ignat. Interspersed with these are independent visions not belonging to any one time and newsreel footage of Russian conflicts in Spain, China, and of course the Second World War. Making things even more complex/interesting are the double castings of Margarita Terekhova as both Maria and Natalia, and Ignat Daniltsev as the young Aleksei and Ignat.
If you can’t figure it out immediately, the movie clicks into place when modern Aleksei outright says to Natalia that when he thinks of his mother he sees her. The whole picture comes into focus as a amalgamation of memory and dreams, of how Aleksei observed, interpreted or in some cases imagined various moments in his past. And in this it is extremely fascinating what is retained and how that informs on who this man is. His mother is seen almost exclusively in terms of apprehension if not outright stress, whether in conversation with her doctor or in her work as a proofreader (same as Tarkovsky’s own mother) where she is berated for no reason by a colleague. It is clear that, her husband in the service, she is raising Aleksei and his sister on her own, and there is an agitation to Terekhova’s performance, suggestive of some deeper issues that Aleksei and the viewer can’t quite reach. Some memories are clearly tinged by emotion, such as Aleksei’s youth military training in which he talks back to his demanding drill sergeant or what looks to be pastoral bliss in the context of his father finally coming home.
The real thrill of Mirror is not so much in dissecting these moments as in seeing them. Tarkovsky is known for his slow evocative compositions, his spellbinding imagery, and it’s what brings so much of this movie to life. He’ll focus in on just a woman sitting on a fence overlooking a field or a dying man’s hand gracefully clutching a bird. There aren’t a whole lot of his notorious long takes here, but one we do get in black and white of a woman walking down an autumn city street is mesmerizing. The colour contrasts, though their thematic purpose is more a mystery, aesthetically compliment each other by drawing focus to one another’s richness. And then there are the dream effects, the way a room’s geography changes as a camera circles it, a woman disappears but the condensation from her glass remains behind, the wind in a field creates sea-like waves. There are moments of inspired eeriness in the disturbed insistence of a neighbour woman that Maria slaughter a chicken, and especially as juxtaposed against footage of a barn burning down from the inside, a scene of Maria after a wash letting her hair hang over her face and looking an outright poltergeist against the high contrast lighting. And frequently we see people reflected by mirrors, looking into them and at one point near the end, directly at us through the mirror of the camera.
Yeah, for a confusing movie Mirror can be very literal. This is what the movie is: a mirror of both Tarkovsky’s mind and potentially our own experience of memory and thought. The line quoted above reveals at least some facet of an overarching meaning, a sentiment we can perhaps all relate to. This is a movie meant to be studied. But it is for certain a gorgeous study.

Criterion Recommendation: Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Believe it or not, I saw this movie for the first time just a couple months ago and was somehow caught off guard by it’s sweet mix of sincerity and subversiveness. Little Miss Sunshine, the humble indie dramedy that took America by storm in 2006, is an incredibly charming movie about a dysfunctional family on a road trip to the beauty pageant their youngest is determined to compete in. The assortment of odd characters, each with their own interacting pains and anxieties crammed in that old yellow Volkswagen microbus is the root of the movie’s charms and its heart. The script by Michael Arndt, for which he won an Oscar, defines them all so well, their turbulent relationships to each other and the world itself. It not only satirizes the weird, discomfiting world of child beauty pageants, but ultimately turns into a celebration of outsiders, opaquely illustrated by that wonderful family dance to “Super Freak” in the climax. The cast is sensational, from heartwarming young Abigail Breslin to vulgar old Alan Arkin (the film’s other Oscar winner) to Steve Carrell in the first real showcase of his dramatic chops. A tender and influential mark on the American indie scene, and one that deserves a Criterion look.

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