Six Paragraphs on Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘The Mirror’

Memories are not chronological. They do not visit us in the order in which we created them. Memories are also not entirely past. One does not visit them with the objective of purely visiting the past. The remembrance has its origins in the present. I may visit the memory of a summer afternoon when the lazy, dusty, hot weather meant seeking shelter under a tree between the games, and once I was in the vicinity of the Mango tree, making attempts at climbing it; I do not remember the days of the week when I did this but I remember the sensory details. I am reminded of this event from the past because on a certain day in the present – summer or winter, it doesn’t matter – I am unable to climb any tree. I am reminded of the time I could.

I am also reminded of the time when happiness was unbound, when I was a child. In its very basic construct, happiness is directly proportional to the ratio of possibilities-to-limitations, each of the numerator and denominator being functions of time among other things. When one is born, the numerator starts its downward descent, and with every stage of one’s life, possibilities tend to reduce (for example, in Middle School, one can hold the possibilities of being a Lawyer, a Surgeon, a Mathematician, a Clarinet Player, or a Writer. In college, the ‘possibility set’ reduces.) The humans, as we are, therefore, in the situation of perpetually declining happiness, tend to revisit the memories – when more was possible, when limitations were limited – in our desperate attempt to catch again the breath of mirth, exhaled years ago.

When I finished watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, I was overwhelmed and shaken. Once I came to my senses after vague meanderings of the evening and failed attempts to drown into sleep, I became aware of at least one of the objectives of this film, and that is to cinematically represent the desperate attempt described above. It is a semi-autobiographical movie that Tarkovsky directed after ‘Solaris’ – a science fiction story about a mysterious planet and a psychiatrist. While Solaris continues to be one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time, Tarkovsky said he felt constrained by the genre. So he ended up pouring his pent-up creative genius in the next feature about the mind of a man on his death bed, the mind that makes a hurried attempt to grasp all that was the life of this man.

Narrated in the stream of consciousness style, which I had never imagined was possible in Cinema, the director goes back and forth, telling the story of his mother (in pre-war era) and wife (in post-war era) played flawlessly by the same actress (Margarita Terekhova) and of himself (in war era) and his son (in post-war era) played by the same child actor (Ignat Daniltsev). A majority of the movie is a collection of dream sequences, and we know how visually fascinating and incoherent dreams can be (there is a scene where the mother is floating mid-air, and another where she is drenched, smiling and the ceiling of the house falls around her). However, amidst the chaos of dreams, fluctuation of memories, and assumptions of the mind, we get one fantastic view of a life lived.

Personally, The Mirror, was also a technical revelation. I have not seen anything like this on screen. The opening sequence of the mother, sitting on the fence of her house, smoking a cigarette and looking out at the wide green field, and her encounter with a stranger, clutched me for good, and it especially hit me hard when the cinematographer captured the wind rustling through the grass (the above image is from the very scene). What followed was nothing but sheer brilliance, matching the technical nuances of the opening. Another sequence that I just cannot shrug off is when the mother walks through pouring rain to her office and ends up taking a shower in the bathroom. Because we know that everything is in the narrator’s mind, we also know that his mother would have just told him that she had to walk a lot in the rain, which translated on-screen to a 5 minute scene of her just waking in the rain. One must see it to understand the impact and absurdity of it all.

It is 2.30 AM in the night when I am writing this and 8 hours since I finished the movie. I knew that if I did not immediately write about what I felt, I would not be able to sleep well. I also know that many scenes will haunt me for a few days and that this movie will remain one of the most moving and disturbing work of Art I have witnessed, right up there with Rapahel’s The School of Athens, Winged Victory of Samothrace, Camille Claudel’s Le Valse, Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, and Dinkar’s Rashmirathi. It messes up with the mind like Poetry, in its various forms of materialization, should. You can watch it on Youtube.