Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Year Released: 1975
Rating: 3.0
Tarkovsky's work is, perhaps, the most challenging cinema has to offer; he was a poet more than a storyteller, not restrained by any standard rules. Some people detest and dismiss his work as being pretentious and extremely long-winded; others claim insist his work is so powerful because it is so difficult. I've seen quite a number of his films to date, and am less turned off by his approach than, say, Antonioni or some of the French filmmakers, who seem transfixed by static shots and stagnation. Tarkovsky's films can hardly be called "stagnant" - there's always something going on, and the camera is always on the go, moving in and out hallways, across skylines, over faces. The Mirror, a portrait of the director's youth and memories, is pretty much impossible to define and more challenging to criticize: you cannot look for a static message in the sequence of images. The director, in fact, claimed it meant nothing at all. But meaning or no meaning, The Mirror is an admirable work, suffusing dream logic, vivid imagery, stock footage and Tarkovsky's father's poems in tandem to create a complex tour de force. I'm one that likes to find some sort of message in anything I watch; I was stumped most of the way, but kept in mind what the director was trying to do, and will always admire him for it.
