Mirror

A famous legend imagines the top soviet critics baffled at the end of a test screening of Mirror, trying to piece together its meaning, without success. The intellectuals kept arguing and would not leave the room, until the cleaning lady, fed up with their presence and more than else longing to be able to finish her work and go home, interrupted them giving the perfect summary of what happens in the film: a dying man in his forties remembers his life, fights with his regrets, as memories and dreams fade together.

Tarkovsky's Mirror is not a solid reflection, it is rather best described as a shattered mirror, fragmented, caleidoscopical, composed by isolated pieces that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. The single scenes are pieced together not in a linear order, but in terms of associations, of a sort of stream of consciousness, a thin line of meaning or inter-reference being the only connection: there is a house burning, and in the next scene, a voice on a phone call talks about having dreamt of it; his mother mentions the death of an old co-worker, and the next scene is an episode in which she had a confrontation with her. Margarita Terekhova's likeness fits both the mother and the wife, as the protagonist points out midway through the film that he often remembers her in stead of his mother in his childhood memories.

As the film progresses, the associations become more loose, even if always motivated, always clear. It is hard to imagine that this film could be edited in any other way, even though apparently Tarkovsky spent considerable time recutting it, reordering the scenes, trying to find the perfect angle - which he did reach. 

The fragmented narrative of Mirror somehow does not clash with Tarkovsky's dilated sense of time. The isolated episode maintain the pacing, the use of elaborate long takes - in fact, this is the first Tarkovsky film that is allowed to gain a degree of metaphor, that is detached from any concept of genre. A pure experimentation, a film that somehow encompasses all the topics of the filmmaker's career. It is in this that the multiformity of the film emerges aswell: it can be watched and assimilated from countless angles.

The protagonist, Alexei, is never seen in his adult form, not even through one of the countless mirrors that appear in the frame. His consciousness drives the narrative, shapes the representation of the people surrounding him, much like a camera and an auteur interprets reality in the filmmaking process. As a result, it is interesting to note the depth that Terekhova's dual characters feature. The film in its entirety  is an ultimate male gaze, personified, yet Maria, the mother, and Natalia, Alexei's ex-wife, end up inevitably constitute the emotional centerpoint, with their sensibility, strength, human fragility displayed with a complexity rarely bestowed by Tarkovksy himself to the women in his other films, or by any male filmmaker. 

The mystical and the oniric are entirely indistinguishable in this film - the supernatural hypnosis of the opening scene or the surreal appearance of the woman sitting at a table compose an invisible thread with the countless scenes of dreams, the levitation, the unreal that never forms into actual symbolisms or metaphors, but contributes to the verticality, the sense of ascension that the film is conveying. 

It is no doubt that Mirror is a masterpiece, perhaps Tarkosvky's best work, but also a film that mends complexity and sensitivity with a harmony that has very rarely ever been reached in the history of cinema.

RATING: 5/5

Original title: Zerkalo

Directed by: Andrei Tarkovsky

Country: USSR

Year: 1975

Length: 106 min.

Premiere: /

Availability: Youtube (official Mosfilm channel), The Criterion Channel (US only)