Mirror (1975): Tarkovsky shows us his dreams, his memories and his lasting influence (Review)

Everyone who’s ever watched a classic film decades after its release will have had the same experience: you watch it, but you don’t just watch the film, you realise where a thousand other films, TV shows, songs and more got their inspiration from. That strange quality of deja vu is most appropriate for Mirror, Andrei Tarkovsky’s fourth film, released on Blu-Ray by Criterion UK. Mirror is nothing if not a film about how the past keeps recurring, told using a deliberately wrong-footing mix of styles: high-gloss monochrome, poetic voiceover, highly choreographed long takes and grainy newsreel.

To add to the memories of the forty-something protagonist Alexei, we can add our own memories: of The Tree of Life, Humanite and The Revenant, all of which have moments inspired by the memorable levitation sequence, of Antichrist, whose closing dedication to Tarkovsky seems less perverse once you notice the stylistic similarities between von Trier’s opening scene and a dream sequence involving a flooding house in Mirror. We may remember that Joanna Hogg screened this film to her crew before making Exhibition, or we may think ahead to Tarkovsky’s own final film The Sacrifice, whose central image of a burning house finds echo in an early scene from Mirror. We might also note that few directors seem bold enough to mimic Mirror’s narrative innovations, rather than just echo its images. One noble exception is Carlos Reygadas, whose 2012 film Post Tenebras Lux similarly jumps between different visual styles, time periods and levels of reality in an attempt to paint a full portrait of a man’s inner life and memories.

Post Tenebras Lux is a particularly interesting comparison because it’s Reygadas’s most popular film in his native Mexico, just as Mirror was championed by Russian audiences long before foreign critics started hailing it as a masterpiece. This suggests there are levels to Mirror that are inaccessible to non-Russian viewers, and while there are unquestionably some very local ingredients in here, it’s possible to overstate this. Firstly, what happened to 20th-century Russia happened also to the world. The newsreel footage is sourced from the years 1935-6, 1943-5 and 1969, three-time periods that do correlate to significant ages in the life of Alexei (and Tarkovsky), but which also have resonance as national traumas: the run-up to the Nazi-Soviet pact, the devastating endgame of World War II and the end of the space race.

I also think, though, that there are some parts of Mirror that are purposely inaccessible. Tarkovsky uses the same monochrome to depict distant memories and dreams as if acknowledging that some of his recollections may be tinged with fantasy – and the fact that the objective reality of the newsreel scenes also involve black and white film stock makes the film’s visual scheme even harder to read. The film begins with a startling documentary clip of a stammerer being cured by hypnotherapy; as the patient barks “I can talk!” we cut to the title card. The implication is that Tarkovsky, too, has found his voice, that he can now say things that have been inside his head for far too long. When Mirror is hard to understand, it may be an attempt to create a sense of intimacy, a sense that some of these memories are too personal to be fully understood by anyone else.

Tarkovsky’s original plan shows he was thinking about exploring the subjectivity of memory long before he arrived on the film’s final subject matter. He wanted to intercut his recreated memories with clips of his own mother being interviewed about the same events, presumably to offer an alternative perspective on them. This idea developed into the newsreel segments, but Tarkovsky’s mother does make an appearance as the oldest version of Alexei’s mother. Alexei’s voiceover is read – and written – by Tarkovsky’s father, and Tarkovsky himself makes a bed-bound cameo at the end of the film.

It is, then, a family affair, so it makes perfect sense for Criterion to pair the film with Andrey Tarkovsky: A Cinema Prayer, a feature-length documentary by the film-maker’s son Andrey A Tarkovsky. Mirror, like its title, is a film that reflects what the viewer brings to it, and A Cinema Prayer will be no less subjective. For me, A Cinema Prayer’s attempt to recreate the structure of Mirror – Tarkovsky’s voice-over taking the place of Tarkovsky’s father’s voice-over in the feature, and so on – felt unsatisfying after watching the genuine article. This personal, strange, insular, magical film is a hard one to imitate – although, as noted above, that’s never stopped, anyone.

THANKS FOR READING GRAHAM’S REVIEW OF THE MIRROR

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