A television documentary shows a young man being treated for a severe stutter. A woman perches upon a bowed fence, gazing upon a pastoral landscape. Nearby children are sleeping. A gust of wind brushes through the undulating foliage, causing everyone to pause, as though grasping at some elusive memory. Soon a house will catch fire. Later the woman will rush back to the printing press where she works, panicked that she may have made a disastrous typographical error—this is Stalinist Russia, and there are words that can ruin lives. Soon a father will tell a son about a red-haired girl he once loved. There will be newsreel footage, of the Spanish Civil War, of Soviet troops wading through the shallow, muddy waters of Lake Sivash, of clamoring Chinese holding up the Little Red Book. There’ll be a second woman, physically resembling the first, but more guarded, modern and icily sexy than her twin, who’ll examine herself in mirrors while talking to a man who remains off-camera. There’ll be a snow-blanketed field where children play in an evenly scattered formation, as though staged by Brueghel. All of these scenes, separated by time, by their varied roots in personal memories or dreams, hearsay or history, flow into one another, linked only by the filmmaker’s carefully guided stream of consciousness and ever-drifting camera; by the immersive central performance by Margarita Terekhova, who resembles the young Meryl Streep, as the filmmaker’s mother and first wife; and by poems read by their author, who’s also the filmmaker’s father, though this is never made explicit. The Mirror (1975) has typically been described as Andrei Tarkovsky’s most difficult film. So why is this the one that moves me most?
(more…)