Mirror (1975, Andrei Tarkovsky)

63/100

Second viewing, last seen at the Walter Reade in 2008. Wasn't writing up older movies at that time, but I did post my ten favorite rep viewings of the year to the nerd group, and Mirror (then rated 75/100) was included:

Another purely formal exercise—this time in a register that usually doesn't quite work for me, viz. the so-called "tone poem." But for some reason I just flat-out surrendered to Tarkovsky's exquisite, almost animistic imagery (did Malick see this right before making Days of Heaven?), scarcely concerning myself with What It All Means. It's a state of mind I'd like to achieve more frequently, to be honest.

So much for that dream. Actually, I have a history of cooling toward experimental features on second viewing, which I fear may mostly be a matter of watching on the big screen vs. watching at home. (Consequently, I'm a bit leery of revisiting the #1 film on that aforementioned list, Oshima's Violence at Noon, which felt exhilaratingly assaultive when it dominated my entire field of vision). Same thing happened with Gastón Solnicki's very non-narrative Kékszakállú, for example (though that was a gentler downgrade, from 72 to 66). Thing is, though, in this case I was enraptured all over again for the first ~35 minutes, most of which I spent wondering whether my rating might go up 10-15 points. Opening scene's an enigmatic marvel, as a hypnotist cures a young man of his pronounced stutter by first making his hands magically immobile and then releasing them, explaining that this will simultaneously unbind his tongue; this sequence features no characters from the film proper (it's not clear to me that Tarkovsky even shot it himself, given the somewhat distressed look) and has no obvious retroactive thematic import, but like Haneke's similar device in Code Unknown, it puts you in a receptive, inquisitive mood. And then we get a series of visually spectacular moments—that undulating wave-like ripple of grass as the doctor walks away (how?! I refuse to believe it was serendipitous, especially given the weird-ass physics); a burning barn first barely glimpsed at a distance through one doorway as the kids stare at it and then, as the camera keeps gliding through the house, seen more squarely via another opening from which water drips in elemental contrast; I could go on but this sentence is already unwieldy verging on unreadable—and fascinating odd anecdotes, like Maria's freakout about the typo she mistakenly thinks slipped by her at the printing press. (That's presumably meant to reflect her fear of reprisal and Russia's authoritarianism, but as someone who corrects errors in sent texts, I may have over-identified with it.) There's even a shot that looks straight out of J-horror, a quarter century before that subgenre even existed. (Couldn't find a good still, this is just a YouTube grab.)

Now, during those initial 35 or so minutes, it's never terribly clear what Mirror is about, in part because we haven't yet "seen" much of the adult Aleksei. (When I recently praised If I Had Legs I'd Kick You's formal conceit of never quite showing the protagonist's young daughter, I'd forgotten that Tarkovsky does pretty much the same thing here, keeping adult Aleksei's face out of the frame at all times.) But you do grasp what's important: that we're flipping through someone's memories the way one randomly flips through pages of a book (which Tarkovsky shows someone do at one point). It's what I think of as the Terence Davies approach, though obviously Tarkovsky got there first, and it depends for its effectiveness upon each recalled incident or moment demonstrating its seismic impact, making it clear why it's remained lodged in the rememberer's psyche ever since. For me, that's abundantly true of Mirror's first third (up to and including the lengthy typo sequence and its aftermath), significantly less true of what follows. And I think that's because the film, for all its vaunted difficulty/insularity/obfuscation, actually becomes more direct in its aims around that point, eroding much of the mystery that had previously powered it. Tarkovsky starts tossing in archival footage (almost certainly of more relevance to Russian audiences of the '70s than to me—I know zilch about the '69 Sino-Soviet border crisis), focusing on comparatively banal marital arguments, leaning harder on his dad's poetry (which you kinda have to know was written and is being read by the director's father...and even then, I'd argue that its inclusion is still more pretentious than not). Apart from the final shot, which is typically (for this filmmaker) magnificent, there's nothing in Mirror's last hour that compares to the sustained uncanny intensity of its first half hour(-plus). Not sure why it didn't strike me that way 17 years ago, which is why I still worry that watching certain films (Ugetsu is another) in any format other than a good 35mm print effectively ruins the experience. On video, it was akin to a triple album that's corralled all of the bangers onto sides one and two, with another couple discs of decent filler.