The Mirror is an unstable work in which a dazzling formal beauty and a nebulous narrative collide, so rich and dense is its content. It is a monumental film-drawer, a form of film-sum that condenses the themes and obsessions of its author enriched by its autobiographical aspect but also a film-world in which all the arts intersect.
“Words cannot make what you feel. They are dull… It’s funny, I just saw you in a dream» said at the beginning of the film Aliocha, the fictional double of Tarkovski, to his mother on the phone. It would almost be a profession of faith on the part of the filmmaker, that the fictitious image (here the dream), fantasized or rigged is a vector of meaning superior to language. Tarkovski’s films are rarely talkative, leaning more towards contemplation, and The Mirror does not serve as a counter-example. Even better, Tarkovski substituted poetry for dialogue, being able to convey an emotion. And if poetry transcends speech, it is also, almost by definition, the search for the beautiful gold in Tarkovsky this essential search, as a parade to death, is as well brought to the ear of the spectator by the reading of the texts of his father, Arseni Tarkovski, on the screen. Indeed, the first half-hour of the Mirror is a pure demonstration of visual maestria and a lesson of staging during which Tarkovski dissects and reinvents a whole part of the grammar of cinema. In what seems to be a single movement of grandiose fluidity, the film goes from color to black and white, from flash-back to flash-forward, from archive images to fictional shots, from dialogues to voice-over. All these tools are put at the service of a purity of the look on the world by tracing the life of Aliocha, at the point of death.
But if poetry is put at the service of beauty, of formal perfection it is because the poet is also and constantly in search of the right word, the exact word that passes not only through the verses of Tarkovsky’s father but also the time of a staggering sequence in a printing press during which a corrector stalks in the midst of machines and handwritten proofs the shell that would have escaped him. And when words fail, as between Aliocha and her mother, there is still music and the body. Because the Mirror is also a song (Bach, Purcell) of gestures (be it those of hypnosis, a washing of hair or the choreography of a matador) that Tarkovski stages, creating a cinematic art that goes beyond understanding, the understanding that would pass through a common language, to link it to the image and music in order to give birth to a pure audiovisual poetry.
In this big organized disorder, the filmmaker is not in a simple approach of aesthetic perfection (although this is real, as evidenced by these slowdowns in the printing press, the play of reflections that do justice to the title, attention to elements such as the wind in the plain, the scene of fire or levitation as pure mystical visions) but in a quest for an absolute, an understanding of the very foundation of human nature. If he keeps juggling between a hallucinated realism and the abstract supernatural, Tarkovski is basically a filmmaker of the real who manages to detach himself from any notion of space, temporality or stakes because he is only interested in questioning. At the rhythm of throbbing travellings, Tarkovski seeks the voice, the gesture, the image just to tell and narrate his world, what surrounds him and exceeds him. The Mirror is a film that questions itself perpetually at the same time on its own matter, how can a work tell a life or, in the broad sense, a humanity? In a thousand ways, of course, Tarkovski, from his fourth feature film – he will only make seven, engages in an autobiography like no other in which the life of an author would not pass through narration but through intimate visions disconnected from each other popping up randomly, to the film of a memory that wanders… This incessant digression illuminated by the belief of its author transcends individual borders to make appear on the screen a whole world. Here, the infinitely small encounters the infinitely great as well as the personal memory of the filmmaker, the oral presence of his father endorsing the autobiographical dimension, meets the history of a country, even of a whole humanity. It is then necessary to see The Mirror as a central film, literally, because at the same time matrix and synthesis of his work in his way of accumulating the images Tarkovskiennes past as to come. There is a telephone that links the afterlife and reality, but also the supernatural, telekinetic or levitating, that surrounds the female or child bodies (Stalker), the burning hearth (The Sacrifice), the ghosts of the past that literally haunt the present (Solaris) or this poster of Andrei Roublev in the house of Aliocha.
The other work of the film is precisely this reflection on existence in the most universal way possible. The Mirror is a work in constant search of accuracy (to refer once again to this feverish race in the printing press to track a mistake) and in a until the absolute boutisme, Tarkovski widens his field of vision (one might as well say of study or reverie) from the intimate to the global. Beyond pastoral lyricism, there is a crude, political poetry (the vision of children traumatized by war, bombing and firearms), transcendental which is the result of pure faith in images and sounds as vectors of his singular vision of an entire, complex world full of contradictions. Therefore, it is necessary to appeal to all the arts and all the cinematographic forms to understand even a tiny proportion. It is in this perspective that Tarkovski uses fiction but also documentary, experimental, photography and especially the reference to his masters. This is what is most touching in filmography and particularly in the Mirror, this ability to articulate an eminently political representation of his country and his century that rubs shoulders with artistic figures and an exploration of nature, symbolized at the turn of a plan by a dead leaf in an art book next to the portrait of Leonardo da Vinci (yours, the Renaissance) while Aliocha’s father returns from the war. Nature is here more than ever constitutive of human existence, all the more so in this 20th century Russia traumatized by the Second World War and the resulting dehumanization. Also, are summoned Chekhov and Dostoievsky who through their novels or plays dissected the Russian society and mores like few others, Rousseau for this perpetual search for a common humanism as well as Flemish primitives like Brueghel the Elder for painting, drawing a form of human bestiality through these paintings that finds here an obvious visual reference. There is therefore in The Mirror a mad ambition to touch through cinema an artistic globality able to express a vision of the world whose point of view is certainly intimate, but whose aim is universal. It is a moving, anxious work, transmitting the intranquillity of an author who seeks to live by all means by going elsewhere, both the impalpable and the trivial, but especially towards others to face the pain (that of a wounded filmmaker, of a polarized world at the end of its breath?).
The Mirror is a dense film, perhaps the most illegible of Tarkovsky’s, but it is a terribly exciting work in its way of articulating the worlds, developing different layers of reading and unfolding a dizzying abyss. It is a unique autobiography of its kind in which Tarkovski makes himself seen, visualising a life far from having reached its end full of dazzling visions and surreal traumas.
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