I think that I have reached what is metaphorically called the ‘glass ceiling’ of my cinematic understanding today. Somehow, in my youth, I missed the opportunity to watch ‘The Mirror‘ (the Russian title is ‘Zerkalo‘), Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1975 film. I went to see it now, half a century after it was filmed, with huge expectations. I think Tarkovsky is one of the greatest filmmakers whose films I have ever seen. Two of his films are masterpieces, references, 10-stars films for me. These are ‘Solaris’ and ‘Stalker’. ‘Mirror‘, however, left me bewildered when I watched it, and I remained confused even after the inscription so familiar to me in my youth appeared – ‘End of the film’ in Russian – and the lights came on. Yes, it is a beautiful and interesting film, a film like I have never seen and will never see again. For me, however, it was a difficult artistic and intellectual experience, the film did not move me or tell me much about the man who made it, about his times, or about me.
I think the best way to define ‘Mirror‘ is as a poem in images and sometimes in words combined with a collection of memories and dreams. Several of the commentators I read talk about the memories of a writer on his deathbed. To be honest, I found almost nothing in the film that would suggest this interpretation to me. Here we probably get closer to the core of my problem with ‘Mirror‘ – the lack of any narrative structure and, in fact, even more – the absence of any intention to tell a story. We witness a succession of sequences – some from the past, others from the present of the 1970s, related to the narrator who is presented in his childhood and adolescence, to the memories of his mother (especially) and of his mostly absent father gone to war, then separated from his family (I think). Some sequences are filmed in black and white, others in color. Fictional or dream scenes are interspersed with documentary sequences about the conflicts of the mid-20th century, starting with the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Chinese Revolution. The soundtrack is spoken by the great actor Innokentiy Smoktunosvskiy and by the filmmaker’s father, a renowned poet who reads from his poems. The music includes fragments of classical compositions by composers such as Bach or Purcell.
There are many moments of great beauty in ‘Mirror‘. The film seems composed of a fabric of metaphors. I resonated with some of them: the mirrors, the fading fingerprint, the symbol of the cross that sets in the setting of a world without icons. Others I could not decipher, for example the levitation scene. The same formidable actress named Margarita Terekhova plays both the roles of the mother and of the partner (wife?) with whom the narrator shares his life in adulthood. When it comes to the world and society around his hero, Tarkovsky tells about it within the limits of what could be said in a Soviet film in the 70s. In one of the scenes that takes place during the years of Stalinist terror, the mother experiences a panic attack, fearing that she made a mistake in proofreading some printed materials at the printing house where she worked. A refugee immigrant from Spain cannot return to his country on the other side of the Iron Curtain and, struck by nostalgia, talks passionately in Spanish about bullfighting. The years of refuge are marked by deprivation, but also by life in a nature that overwhelms the human in its dimensions. The scene that opens the film seems seemingly completely detached from the rest of the story, but it suggests something, perhaps, about mind control through hypnosis. The film is very personal, the director’s father and sister also participated in its creation. Dreams do not follow narrative or coherence rules, they are often gateways between the real world and imaginary worlds. When shared, they often need keys to be deciphered and create resonance. When watching this film, I missed many of these keys to Tarkovsky’s world.