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-31st, 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.

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Where to watch Mirror