Something to watch tonight: Friday 16 May

50 Greatest Films #31 (equal): Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1975)

Apologies for the lack of an update yes­ter­day – it turned into a busy day with a wash­ing machine repair in the morn­ing and then a pitch/demo ses­sion for PickPath (the app plat­form I’m doing some con­sult­ing and busi­ness devel­op­ment for) fol­lowed by a 90-minute job inter­view for a job I really want.

This morn­ing star­ted with a call-out for some plumb­ers to look at a leak that has appeared out­side our house, their response being “Welcome to the homeowner’s worst night­mare” and a recom­mend­a­tion that we need to replace the entire 40-or-so metres of 80-year-old ori­gin­al gal­van­ised pipe bring­ing water to the house from the street.

Which is to say, if you were sit­ting on the fence about becom­ing a paid sub­scriber to this news­let­ter, now might be a good time to make the leap.

Over the last few years I’ve been work­ing my way through the top 50 films in the 2022 Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time list and I’ve now made it to the equal-31^st, Tarkovsky’s 1975 avant-garde favour­ite, Mirror.

I con­fess to not being a Tarkovsky expert, des­pite see­ing Solaris and Stalker a couple of times each, Andrei Rublev once and his final film, The Sacrifice, at the New Zealand International Film Festival in 1986, the year it came out. What I do know is that – no mat­ter how baff­ling they can be – his films are nev­er less than watch­able and that’s as true for Mirror as it is for the others.

Conceived in 1964 but unfun­ded by Soviet-era pro­du­cers until the suc­cess of Solaris (1972) left them no choice, Mirror is a semi-autobiographical dream­s­cape of a film about Alexei, a dying poet who we hear but nev­er see, remem­ber­ing his child­hood in a rur­al farm­house, trau­mat­ic teen­age mil­it­ary train­ing, argu­ments with his ex-wife over the rais­ing of their son, drink­ing with Spanish exiles and, of course, some actu­al sepia-toned dream sequences.

Thematically, the sequences are linked by Alexei’s moth­er Maria (played as a young­er woman by Margarita Terekhova, who also plays Alexei’s ex-wife, and as an older woman by Tarkovsky’s own moth­er, also named Maria). The sequences are phys­ic­ally linked by news­reel foot­age – of the Spanish Civil War, a Soviet bal­loon­ist, the atom­ic bomb.

I love exper­i­ments like this – although exper­i­ment doesn’t seem like quite the right word for a film that is so indif­fer­ent to tra­di­tion­al nar­rat­ive but so con­fid­ent in what it has to say and how it goes about say­ing it. Non-linear storytelling, patch­work edit­ing, mys­ter­i­ous vign­ettes, every­one seem­ingly hav­ing tears on their cheeks – right up my alley.

I’m cur­rently read­ing Richard Flanagan’s book, Question 7, which this film reminded me of a lot. In the book, Flanagan looks back on his own life and pon­ders the remark­able impact that the bomb­ing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on it. Because those bombs did hasten the end of the war and if they hadn’t been dropped, his fath­er – who was a Japanese prisoner-of-war – would not have sur­vived to return to Australia and, well, become Flanagan’s father.

Apart from the shared “shad­ow of the bomb” though, that story is not what I was think­ing of (although if it grabs you, you’ll cap­tiv­ated by the book as a whole). I was think­ing of a couple of lines from the book. Firstly, “Experience is but a moment. Making sense of that moment is a life.” And then this: “Life is always hap­pen­ing and has happened and will hap­pen, and the only writ­ing that can have any worth con­founds time and stands out­side of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep with­in it, seek­ing the answer to one insist­ent ques­tion: who loves longer?” That’s Question 7, by the way.

Where to watch Mirror

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Worldwide: Streaming on the offi­cial MosFilm YouTube channel

Aotearoa, Australia, Ireland, UK: Digital rental

Canada & USA: Streaming on Criterion Channel

India: Not avail­able online