The Mirror (1975) - film review

As a middle-aged man lies dying in hospital, he is oblivious to his present surroundings and seeks refuge in his memories, fractured imprints of a life that is rapidly nearing its end.  He recalls his mother and his wife, the two people who have had the greatest impact on him.  He remembers his childhood, his son, his experiences during the war.  It is a confused maelstrom of seemingly random recollections, like splinters of a broken mirror, but gradually the pieces begin to come together and in their reflection the dying man begins to see the worth of the life he has lived...

Andrey Tarkovskiy’s fifth film is his most challenging but also his most visionary masterpiece, an autobiographical poem that presents the fractured consciousness of a man who is slowly dying and who attempts to make sense of his existence through a bewildering collage of disconnected memories.  In more ways than one, The Mirror is to the art of cinema what Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is to the literary novel; it propels us on a similar journey of introspection through the interlocking crevices of time and memory, compels us to reflect deeply on the significance and value of existence, but it does so with far greater economy and in a way that is perhaps easier to engage with.  Whilst it has nothing like the depth and coherence of Proust’s novel, Tarkovskiy’s film has greater immediacy and impact; once you have accepted its heretical denial of structure, it grips you like no other film.  What takes Proust seven substantial volumes of dense, beautifully composed text to achieve Tarkovskiy’s The Mirror accomplishes in less than two hours of cinema.  We may not be able to make sense of more than a fraction of what it shows us, yet somehow the collection of seemingly unrelated images, fragments of a mind that is unravelling in the face of death, has a potent and enduring resonance when taken as a whole.  It is a film that is both impenetrable and beguiling, a film that will haunt you forever once you have seen it and opened your consciousness to its exquisite mystique and poetry.

The film intercuts memories from Tarkovskiy’s own life - his childhood and adult life - with snatches of newsreel footage which both identify the significant phases of the author’s life (before, during and after WWII) and suggest the impact that external events have on an individual in the course of his life.  A person’s experiences are, after all, shaped by what is happening in the world around him, even events that are taking place a long way from home.  Dialogue is sparse and most of the soundtrack consists of poems written by the director’s father, Arseny Tarkovsky, poems that have a strange harmony with the images that accompany them.  Much of the focus of the film is taken by Tarkovskiy’s ambiguous relationship with his mother and wife, who are, tellingly, played by the same woman (Margarita Terekhova), except in the one sequence in which Tarkovskiy’s own mother plays the older mother.  To anyone who has read Freud, the mother-wife substitution is easily understood, but this is mirrored by a more enigmatic fusion of identity, that of the author’s son with himself as a young boy.   At times, it is hard to tell who is who, and this is clearly deliberate.  Is this because the author, knowing he is dying, is attempting to merge his own soul with that of his son, to cheat death through a process of willed transmigration?   Or is it merely an attempt to seek solace in the fact that his life will continue after his death through his son’s existence, an existence that will be richer and more meaningful through the experiences that he has passed on to it?   In either case, it is natural for a man to pursue the spectre of immortality when finally confronted with the terror of extinction.

The Mirror is a film that has to be watched several times to appreciate just what a truly remarkable piece of art it is.  On a first viewing, the spectator is presented with an almost insuperable challenge, torn between conventional notions of what a film should be and the uncomforting alternative that Andrey Tarkovskiy offers.  This tension makes it difficult to engage fully with the film and merely adds to the confusion and sense of alienation.  It takes at least two viewings to come to grips with this film and see what an extraordinary and unique piece of art it represents.   The Mirror is a film that feels like a total reinvention of the art of cinema, something that would have emerged naturally if the moving image had gone down a totally different path to the one that was selected in our world.  Gone are all the rigid conventions that have made cinema the most sterile and predictable of art forms.  In their place is a radically different vision of what cinema could be if only we, the audience, were more demanding and filmmakers were more courageous.  It is a tragedy that, since Tarkovsky’s death, cinema has gone even further down the road towards soulless homogeneity.  There are fewer surprises, fewer filmmakers with the inclination and resources to step off the well-worn highway to a mined-out creative cul-de-sac and instead take us into other, more vital and meaningful realms of the imagination.  More than any other film since the Second World War, The Mirror shows what is possible, how much more we have yet to discover in film art.  Tarkovsky was a prophet and through The Mirror, his greatest film, we are given the merest glimpse of just how much more powerful, varied and wondrous the art of cinema can be, if only filmmakers and audiences were minded to loosen the strings on their straitjackets.

© James Travers 2011

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