The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky; 1975)

There was a specific moment in The Mirror when I realized it would be a favorite movie. It’s the scene where the father recalls a scene from a childhood when he looked at a girl walking in the snow. The camera then cut to a close-up of his face, which then cut to a barrel of a gun. Do I love it because it has some rich allusive meaning that explains it all? An allegory about how violence intrudes upon the simple pleasures of life, or something along those lines? Fuck no. I think that too often people talk about films in terms of “And this means this, which means this in the context of scene C, which ties in perfectly with the allegory presented in the opening, which means this and explains why the monkeys touch the monolith.” [Admittedly, this is a practice I too often follow]. The Mirror works both on a level far beyond that, and is also much simpler. I love sequences such as the aforementioned for the simple reason that they contain such a raw power and evoke such strong emotions in the viewer [well – me]. That’s what makes it simple – it doesn’t require any unearthings of unholy symbolism to appreciate. The only real question is why it evokes those emotions, which is naturally a much more complex issue. Incidentally, it’s also an issue I don’t really care about. The film is what it is, that’s that. I’m happy with it.

The film switches willfully and almost spontaneously between color and black&white and past and present. This, combined with the previously mentioned lack of a simple unifying subtext, has led some to call the film a difficult piece of work, but I find that simply ludicrous, as the film is anything but difficult to appreciate. I think that that label is best left to such works as Zorn’s Lemma or L’Âge d’or [at least for me], which may ultimately bear the same fruits, but I find I would have to work much harder to draw any sort of enjoyment, entertainment, much less any sort of stimulation at all from the films. Indeed, I think that The Mirror is one of the easiest films out there to watch: it’s not incredibly long or demanding, like Andrei Rublev or Satantango, a dullness like Saving Prvate Ryan, an intelligent dullness like Battleship Potemkin, and it doesn’t even have the pretension [not something that I personally believe is there] that people like to accuse Lynch of having. Quite simply, it’s aesthetic unrivalled by any other film that I’ve seen, and one that perfectly expresses the elemental purity of film language.

The best film I’ve seen? Yeah, sure. Maybe. I dunno.