MOTHER AND SON (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1997)

In the middle of life, guided by his inspiration, Aleksandr Sokurov has pilgrimaged to a masterpiece, a transparent, massively moving work that, for me, is the most transcendent film of the 1990s. And more: the most humane film in more than thirty years—to be exact, since Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud (1964), whose quietude and nobility it matches. Sokurov’s, though, is the simpler film; for it’s about nothing more than two persons and their familial bond: a dying mother and her grown son, who is her caregiver. Here is a visual poem, spare and spiritually intense. Yet, despite sharing these qualities with the cinema of Sokurov’s great mentor, Andrei Tarkovsky, Mat i syn is Sokurov’s own, neither derivative nor confounded by anxiety of influence—proof that Sokurov has passed out of Tarkovsky’s immense shadow and into his own light. Infinitely removed from the carping sourness of Sokurov’s (undeniably brilliant) The Second Circle (1990), this new light, humane and mysterious, bathes with tender delight; it evokes the stillness of a poet’s soul amidst the silent, steady passage of time.

The setting is one of sublime isolation: a remote country home amidst ravishing landscapes and skyscapes of pristine, unearthly beauty. (Sokurov shot outdoor space by reflection in gigantic mirrors; as a result, the film gives off a haunting glow.) These formidable surroundings set off, and exalt, the intimate humanity at the film’s center. Enfeebled, the woman receives from her son the care she once gave him. Theirs is the bond of a lifetime, although, let me add, bond here is stripped of its double meaning; for these two characters, existing beyond neurotic limits, give freely to one another in the space of pure affection. The son carries his mother outdoors and “walks” her in his arms as once upon a time she walked him; back then, how afraid she was of losing him, she tells him, and how close to herself she therefore kept the small boy that the man now tending to her once was. This shared past holds the deep roots of their mutual love. This relationship of theirs, which Sokurov has described as being a fairy tale, is unmistakably Russian even as the setting, of course, admits, perhaps imposes, Teutonic grandeur. As it happens, the film is a Russian-German co-production—a monument, therefore, to the Cold War’s end, that is to say, finally, the end of the Second World War, where Germany and the U.S.S.R. were such bitter enemies.

The mother-son union that Sokurov creates, then, is gracious and wholesomely intimate; it exists in a world apart. He and his cinematographer, gorgeous colorist Alexei Fyodorov, have applied special lenses that appear to collapse space and remove depth, converging the characters and thus distilling their close connection; as a result, their relationship seems to define rather than fill space. The ease with which our mind and eyes accept the constant (though slight) visual distortion may be a measure of the sympathetic contribution we imaginatively make to the characters’ intimacy; tentatively, almost tenuously, our own humanity seems to be at stake. To our delight, we find we can hold onto it.

Just as his attentive mother once was determined not to lose him, the young man, holding his mother now in his own attentive eye and embrace, assures her that he will not lose her. But this isn’t a film about selfishly (or even selflessly) holding on. It is the season of passage. Exhausted, beyond repair, the mother must take her leave; her son now must let her go. Why then does he tell her he will not let her die? A peculiarly Russian form of irony—it soothes rather than pricks—translates the son’s assurances into the very comfort that the mother needs to pass freely from the earth. Thus the son lays down his mother for her last nap, and she leaves. A butterfly lights on her hand. Her son has been outside, walking. In sympathy and exhaustion he also lies down, while land and sky—rolling-off mists; in the distance a train’s passing—relate his mother’s exhalation, her imminent journeying out. Indoors, the son rejoins her. The butterfly hasn’t quite left her hand. Gently stroking her other hand, the son whispers to his mother’s spirit, which is to say, himself, “Be patient, Mother; wait for me at the place we agreed on”—this, a loving son’s final assurance.

A strange, unsentimental film, this. Like Dreyer’s Ordet (1954) and Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1974), Mother and Son realizes spiritual presences; its present already is memory. Like its tenor, the film’s subject matter is gracious solitude: the mystery of space, and how space is transformed—even defined—by love. The film is also about the solitude of its creator, Aleksandr Sokurov. And ours as his audience, with whom he shares a profound, clear vision rather than opting to manipulate our emotions.

His film—flawlessly acted by two nonprofessionals, Gudrun Geyer and Alexei Ananishnov (the star of his previous Days of Eclipse, 1988)—is pure and poetic. It reverences humanity: ours; the mother’s; the son’s; Sokurov’s own.

THE HOME AND THE WORLD (Satyajit Ray, 1984)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

From a novel by Rabindranath Tagore, Ghare-Baire is Satyajit Ray’s most majestic and splendiferous film. The protagonist is Bimala Choudhury, who recalls her marriage in the early twentieth century. Nikhilesh, her spouse, a wealthy Bengali landowner and merchant, encourages her education and departure from traditional Hindu ways. Bimala eventually has an affair with an old college friend of his, Sandip Mukherjee (Soumitra Chatterjee, brilliant), a leader of the incendiary nationalist movement Swadeshi, whose first female member she becomes. Nikhilesh opposes Sandip’s politics, which he foretells will further divide Hindus and Muslims in a region that the ruling British have partitioned in order to short-circuit an alliance between the two groups. Sandip’s call for a boycott of British imports, Nikhilesh contends, will further impoverish Muslim merchants who are already struggling to survive. When his local agitation falls flat, Sandip organizes and unleashes a terrorist response.
      This is no facile Reds (1981), Doctor Zhivago (1965) or Gone with the Wind (1939), where history supplies a sweeping backdrop for soap opera. Ray, instead, creates a rich tapestry in which British imperialism, Indian nationalism, the Choudhurys’ marriage, Bimala’s tentative moves toward a liberated modernism, and her extramarital affair are tightly interwoven, generating a complex vision of a society in upheaval. Bimala is portrayed as existing uncertainly between two worlds, while the two men in her life, political opponents, are each certain of themselves but only in partial possession of the truth. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see the political views of others apart from the prism of your own views? Ray’s final masterpiece enables us to take in a myriad of sociopolitical shades and inflections in a complex, combustible situation. Moreover, it concludes with a devastating shot telescoping a devastated life.

DEKALOG (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1988)

Written by lawyer Krzysztof Piesiewicz and the director, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s ten-hour Dekalog consists of ten episodes, each of which reflects on one of the Ten Commandments. The action involves residents in a Warsaw apartment complex; another point of unity is a sad, silent observer who, appearing in most episodes, suggests a surrogate for Kieslowski or God, or both. Kieslowski’s moody, somber entries compose a probing portrait of humanity caught in moral dilemmas. The Ten Commandments aren’t always the guide by which human behavior can be morally measured. In the initial episode, a scientist unwittingly sacrifices his son by the faith he places in computers and calculations—a faith, though, that had helped father and son to bond. Often, the commandments seem a codification of moral standards that’s too rigid to provide much guidance through the complex maze of modern realities. Profound mystery permeates most everything we see in the film; but Kieslowski is a secularist, not a religionist, and certainly not a fundamentalist. His Dekalog never degenerates into judgmentalism or pat irony.
      In the second episode, Krystyna Janda brilliantly plays a woman with a lover and a hospitalized sick spouse. She is pregnant, and her husband cannot be the father. Should she have an abortion and choose her husband, or keep the fetus, banking on the fact that her husband will be dead soon, and choose her lover? She defers the impossible choice to her husband’s doctor—a marvelously elusive application of taking the Lord’s name in vain; but the doctor’s “decision” comes out of the complex of his own conflicted life, and the patient’s fate confounds everyone’s “choices” anyhow. All this is typical of the film’s rich procedure.
      Another episode finds the stricture “Thou shalt not kill” falling equally on the killer and the state.

EUROPA (Lars von Trier, 1991)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

The conclusion of Lars von Trier’s stunning “European trilogy” that began with The Elements of Crime (1984) and Epidemic (1988), Europa is like some ghastly prophetic warning that’s couched in such elusive, ambiguous terms that you don’t exactly know how to protect yourself. As Welles did in The Trial (1962), Trier captures, in a stream of highly suggestive, potent black-and-white (and, also, color) images, the helpless way many of us felt in our Century of Sorrows, the twentieth, which thus far is predicting the twenty-first as its unearthly continuation.
      Defeated in the war, 1945 Germany is occupied. Leopold Kessler, an American of German descent, relocates to Germany, where an uncle gets him a job as a sleeping car conductor on the Zentropa train line. Soon, Leo becomes the pawn of two competing sides, the Hartmanns, who own the line, and the occupying forces ferreting out former Nazis. Leo’s neutral position becomes untenable once he falls in love with Katharina Hartmann (Barbara Sukowa, giving the decade’s most brilliant performance—as she had done in the previous decade, as Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemberg). Post-war, then, eerily feels like pre-war and wartime, with Nazism still an able, if, now, creepily insinuating, force. Max von Sydow’s disembodied narration looms as a voice of doom: European history, which is repetitive, compulsive, tragic. The Holocaust, in particular, strikes Trier as a nightmare there is no coming out of.
      One of Trier’s darkest films, Europa (called Zentropa in the States) wraps one up in its grim, gorgeous images (Henning Bendtsen, Edward Klosinski and Jean-Paul Meurisse are Trier’s cinematographers), tightening the folds until one feels like a mummy. The glorious impish comic of The Idiots (1998), Trier’s Dogme 95 masterpiece, isn’t in evidence here. He shouldn’t be.

THE SALTMEN OF TIBET (Ulrike Koch, 1997)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Ulrike Koch’s Die Salzmänner von Tibet documents elemental, nomadic existence. Four tribal men—Old Mother, Old Father, Lord of the Animals, the Novice—journey to a lake in northern Tibet in order to extract salt to sell for grain. The day before, there is a communal discussion; the price of salt currently being very low, how many yaks can they spare, if necessary, to sell for barley? (Seemingly offhanded; actually, life-and-death.) The trek itself is punctuated by religious rituals, singing, cooking, meals, conversations, and recollections spoken into the camera. A bus passes the quartet on a nearby road, disrupting our sense of theirs being a world unto itself. Indeed, a tribal woman earlier prayed for world peace.
      Because it is packed with purposeful activity (including startling shots of people’s hands at work), the tribe’s existence, as represented by the salt-traders, seems sturdier than that of Werner Herzog’s Herdsmen of the Sun (1988). It isn’t. Koch and Pio Corradi, his brilliant color cinematographer, thus conjure images of ephemera. The camera rises to capture voluminous smoke rising from a cooking pot; shadows shimmer across the ground, their substance—yaks—lagging behind. We see the immense shadow from an overhead airplane, whose substance we only hear, its engine’s sound shattering silence. These saltmen shared their experience with the filmmaker, in fact, precisely because they fear that theirs is a vanishing life.
      Koch details the arduous labor of raking the salt and collecting it into mounds for the gathering, sacking, and transport by yak. The conclusive shot of the return home, the longest take in a film full of long takes, evokes not only the slow, steady rhythm of tribal existence but also, powerfully, the hope of survival contained in the saltmen’s patience, tenacity, perseverance.