mirror

the weather is perfect to watch a tarkovsky film. today evening ranjit and me were on the 11^th floor overlooking the dull grey landscape of the city being lashed by unreasonably late rains and flashes of lightning watching ‘mirror’. if i had to choose one tarkovsky film to recommend it would be this one where the personal and political find each other intertwined in the most exquisite images i have seen on screen. i think it would be fair to say that i started watching movies differently after seeing ‘the mirror’.

on the surface (if there is one in this film) the film is a dying mans dreamscape of memory and desire, of unfinished business and a look into his past and the future. but the death is suicide- a necessary end- to exorcise the ghosts that haunt his every relationship where his son, father and himself merge into one being and his mother and lover are the same. the history of a man and a nation is felt rather than understood completely. and maybe that’s why the term ‘poetic’ keeps coming up when i am trying to talk about the film where newsreels and black and white or color footage of the most amazing beauty are strung together like fragments half remembered.

.. and then there are the birds – birds that fly out of a dying mans hands, birds that shatter the window of a house, birds the alight on top of a young boys head and a rooster that is killed with an axe.

a gust of wind blows through the forest.