Rating:
by Derek Smith 4/23/09

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Mirror is at once Andrei Tarkovsky’s most personal and most enigmatic film.  Consisting of a juxtaposition of dreams, memories and newsreel footage, Tarkovsky creates a visually striking, emotionally potent tale of regret, abandonment and unrequited love.  His typically materialist style brings these memories to life through an intense focus on natural elements – flames, dripping water, wind blowing through corridors – to suggest the sensual, rather than experiential, nature of memory.  Using the same actress to portray his mother and ex-wife, Tarkovsky, via his invisible narrator, also examines the transformative power of memory and cinema as a means of means of exploring and coming to terms with one’s own past.

Constructed as a circular, nonlinear narrative, Mirror continuously returns to images of Tarkovsky’s peaceful, remote childhood home and kind-hearted but distant mother, communicating both feelings of safety and emotional remoteness following his father leaving the family behind.  There is a remarkable black-and-white sequence where, following his father’s brief return home on leave, his mother washes her hair in a water basin before the ceiling begins to cave in under the weight of water.  It is a wonderfully evocative yet entirely mysterious and surreal scene where the physical and emotional senses combine – Tarkovsky’s mind taking a distinctive memory of his mother’s wet hair and replanting it on his beloved childhood home, destroyed in the aftermath of a painful reminder of his father’s abandonment.  Symbolism in Mirror often functions in a similarly elusive manner – intensely personal yet embodying universal emotions.

Mirror is most often criticized for being impossible to piece together, but the fragmented structure is absolutely crucial to its deep connection to memory, the tortured Russian soul (particularly in the midst of the atrocities occurring during World War II), and Tarkovsky’s own complex relationship with his parents and his past.  The film is meant to be experienced purely on an emotional plane - broken shards of thoughts, memories, dreams, and regrets that morph fact with fiction and make the real fantastical.   An enormous CCCP hot-air balloon takes flight, a nearby cabin goes up in flames, Mother sits on the front fence enjoying a smoke and, by God, her dripping wet hair – in as much disorder as our minds can be said to be in disorder.  Tarkovsky doesn’t cheapen them or risk their authenticity by constraining them to narrative, allowing them to retain their mystery, telling the story a man without telling a story at all.  This is as insular as cinema can get, but it’s very open and giving if one can resist the temptation to ruin it by trying to reshape it into something recognizable, understandable, mundane.