Mother and Son: Aleksandr Sokurov

Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son is a film of breathtaking, elegiac beauty. It occupies the same detached head-space inhabited by other such dream-like films as Marketa Lazarová (1967), The Mirror (1975), and Eraserhead (1977). To watch Mother and Son is to be lulled into a feverish stupor. The cinematography is deliriously gorgeous, using distorted lenses, mirrors, and sheets of glass to blur, distort, and contract the frame into harsh, one-dimensional images. The film follows the final quiet moments of an elderly mother's life as she is cared for by her son. One long stretch of the film is comprised of him carrying her in his arms to her eventual deathbed, stopping on the sides of various roads to reminisce. The distorted landscapes which comprise so much of the film highlight and identify the emotional states of the characters: shallow, empty, and barren in that particular way that only an autumn afternoon mere minutes before a thunderstorm can be. The last third of the film will be the most polarizing for viewers. Having left his mother for a "walk," the son stumbles through a large assortment of landscapes and lonely environs in near total silence. In the last few minutes he crawls next to his mother's corpse and weeps. Some will see this as one of the most perfect depictions of grief ever put on film. Others will see it as self-indulgent and pretentious. Truth be told, I can see a bit of sense in both arguments.

8/10