Positioned between Andrei Tarkovsky’s two major science-fiction epics—Solaris and Stalker—Mirror is a more personal endeavor, one that draws from the filmmaker’s childhood memories and includes his wife, mother, and father in the cast (the latter reading poems that he composed). Yet this sense of intimacy doesn’t make the film any easier to grasp—which, as with most of Tarkovsky, is to its credit. The heart of his movies always lie just behind a mysterious veil, one perhaps even he can’t fully penetrate. This is cinema through a glass darkly.
In Mirror, a central figure eventually emerges: Aleksei, a Russian poet in middle age, whose dreams and memories involving his earlier years comprise much of the movie. We hear the older Aleksei speak (Innokenti Smoktunovsky), but he mostly remains just off screen. More prominently featured is the adolescent Aleksei (Ignat Daniltsev), who experiences evacuation from Moscow and junior military training during World War II, and Aleksei as a young child (Filipp Yankovsky), when he spent time at his grandfather’s rural property in the years leading up to the war.
Given almost as much screen time and carrying even more of a presence, however, is Aleksei’s mother, Maria (Margarita Terekhova, who also plays the adult Aleksei’s ex-wife). A striking model for Tarkovsky’s signature tableaus—including a sequence in which she washes her hair in a basin and it spreads across the water in tranquil tendrils, as well as another in which she mysteriously levitates in the air—Terekhova also brings real feeling and passion to a film that can, despite its personal origins, feel a bit remote. Aleksei, across his life, seems to be both haunted and sustained by his mother and Terekhova—with a gaze that can shift from soft tenderness to unnerving intensity in an instant—suggests the woman’s many complications, as both an individual and a mythical figure. (Her scenes as Natalia, the adult Aleksei’s ex-wife, of course adds to this.)
Formally, Mirror is a bit lighter on the signature set pieces of other Tarkovsky films, though some of his more familiar and arresting visual motifs do appear: water invading interior spaces; fire consuming a structure as characters helplessly watch; Bruegel the Elder’s The Hunters in the Snow, which hangs on a wall in Solaris and is recreated in Mirror when the adolescent Aleksei looks over a wintry scene of bundled folks walking and playing along a frozen river. Structurally, the film is a collage-like gathering of different film stocks and speeds, as well as stretches of newsreel footage documenting Russia’s military involvement across the century (I’m sure there’s a reading of Mirror as a national portrait as well as a personal one.)
What does it all amount to? As the adult Aleksei’s health begins to fail, Mirror registers as a deathbed reverie of longing and disappointment, loss and despair. And yet, the film offers mesmerizing moments when something indefinable penetrates the mundanity, suggesting a powerful force—stronger than but often represented by water and fire—from another spiritual plane. What I’ll remember most about Mirror are the instances when Tarkovsky, presaging the powers of sorcery he would fully unfurl in Nostalghia, conjures the wind within the frame. The first time this occurs, it’s while a man is walking across a field of wheat, the stalks rippling around him as if the very earth has come alive. He freezes in his tracks, gazing in dumbfounded wonder. Mirror is one of those rare movies that makes me do the same.
(4/28/2023)
