The Mirror
ANDREI TARKOVSKY, 1975
4.5 STARS OUT OF 5
Is it fair to rate a film higher simple because, if you were a movie director, it’d be the film on the Sight & Sound 100 that you’d most likely (with the requisite talent) make? That’s a bit of what I’m doing here, though maybe not so much. Even in my own little way, with the little poems or story outlines I write, I love making things that don’t announce their meaning plainly or cleanly, but dare a person to interpret, or even more, to dream, and maybe even to be a little bothered or agitated. That’s how I experienced The Mirror, one of the best works of avant garde, impressionistic, and transcendental cinema I’ve yet seen.
The images that make up The Mirror are among the most spectacular one can behold. The camera does a slow ballet with the scenery, some of the circular motion where the camera goes around completely or circles back, exhibiting the unexpected or transporting you to totally different times, creates this wonderful juxtaposition between the concrete and abstract, in the most general terms. You can see where a scene like when Joel confronts Dr. Mierzwiak in his memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and he pops up twice on the stage, where Jim Carey was literally running between the two areas of the stage where the camera turns, comes from. Another design element that works beautifully is the archival footage from WWII, among other things. Considering how this film revolves around prewar, war, and postwar periods, and feels as unreal as those clips are starkly real, the footage creates a wonderful contrast to the visual and spoken poetry. I’d likely have to watch a commentary track to understand how everything I’m seeing in The Mirror was brought to fruition, but the effect is dizzying and hypnotic, conflicting and transcendental, the latter being a word with which I don’t always hold positive associations.
I honestly have been looking up synopses and explanations for what literally happens on the screen during The Mirror, but what’s the point of regurgitating that? Do a Google Search. However, this is a film that appears to be about Tarkovsky exorcising demons from his personal life and political situation vis a vis Russia before, during, and after WWII and other conflicts. There’s something quite Oedipal about the same woman playing his mother and the mother of his child, while his mother at older age is played by his actual mother as his avatar in the film, Aleksei, closes in on death in middle adulthood. Feelings of wonder engendered by the fantastic imagery are also accompanied by various difficult moods such as shame, frustration, and defeat. The voice overs consist a lot of Aleksei reciting poems as an adult, and at times emphasize the negation of death and embrace a sense of eternal life. There are many allusions to Christianity and the Christian god, but it isn’t so specific that I, an atheist, can’t something grand from it as well. The eternal isn’t just about literal eternal life to me, but about taking moments and expanding them and living in them until time itself is essentially eradicated. (A dream of mine that I’d certainly put into my film.) Since none of us have experienced the eternal or can possibly know for a 100% certainty what happens after death (though I’m over 99% sure it is much like what existence is like before you exist, which is pure nothing and probably nothing to be afraid of), to me an atheist’s vision of the eternal is as real as the believer’s. At the same time one must acknowledge the role theism plays in Tarkovsky, his art, and specifically The Mirror. It’s what helps him reach the higher level of the transcendent, and probably allows him to conceive of such a mad work of art as The Mirror is.
There’s probably a whole field of scholarship to be had just in analyzing The Mirror, and I’m guessing there is someone on this planet who is considered the ne plus ultra of Tarkovsky Studies. But as a dude who has seen three Tarkovsky films - Stalker, Andrei Rublev, and now The Mirror - this is the one with which I’m most taken. It’s inscrutable, yet Aleksei, his history, beliefs, and hang-ups, are there for you to empathize with. Then, for the fans of great cinematography embedded with stirring images that sit in your mind well after turning the screen off, this hits some tremendous and fascinating highs, which I don’t even care to spoil or discuss. It’s a work of surprises, contradictions, melancholy, and care, and by the end it’s hard to even remember that it starts with a woman smoking a cigarette on a fence, then making small talk with an irritating passerby. I suppose all dreams and dreamworks have to start somewhere.