muddlyjames

Equal parts documentary and drama, the film succeeds brilliantly at the former. We really do get a sense of how this harsh, flinty landscape shapes the people who live in it and how the customs and structures of modern (city) life would feel so foreign to them. The use of chiarscuro lighting in darker scenes, figures set amidst the cathedral lighting of the forest, and the imposing presence of Michele filmed looking upward as he is framed against harsh, white, rocky hillsides and the bottomless gray sky, give a sense of the inherent drama that lies in these people's day to day survival. Unfortunately the drama of the simple, predictable, and yet intrusive plot can't match that of the landscape and the film's pace is occasionally plodding (we literally spend a third of the film watching sheep being driven up and down hillsides). My review: a shrug. But worth a look if you want to learn something about this out-of-the-way corner of the world. 6/10.

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.

Visually and dramatically this is the dullest film I have seen in quite some time. As a typical example, one scene in a dining room, which runs over thirty minutes, consists of exactly three shots: one medium close-up of our lead character, one medium close up of the female he is infatuated with, and, I kid you not, over 15 minutes of footage from a camera placed ACROSS THE ROOM featuring one character with her back to us and another occasionally blocked from view. The majority of the film is in medium to long shot with (yeah, I'm still not kidding) endless voice-overs from the lead character describing his self-loathing and the pointlessness of existence. As you might guess pacing is not considered a major part of the cinematic art by Panfilov and Co. but if a somber, reverent study of self-pity (er, the sufferings of the artist) set against a frozen landscape (oh, the symbolism!) is your cup of borscht, hey ... (actually I wouldn't wright anything at all about this movie but I consider it my public service for the month to warn whatever other foreign film adventurers that might stumble upon this iceberg).