The Mirror
(1975)
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The Mirror
(1975)
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| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
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Margarita Terekhova | ... |
Natalya /
Maroussia - the Mother
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Oleg Yankovskiy | ... |
The Father
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Filipp Yankovsky | ... |
Aleksei - 5-years-old
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Ignat Daniltsev | ... |
Ignat /
Aleksei - 12-year-old
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Nikolay Grinko | ... |
Printery Director
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Alla Demidova | ... |
Lisa
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Yuriy Nazarov | ... |
Military trainer
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Anatoliy Solonitsyn | ... |
Forensic doctor
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Larisa Tarkovskaya | ... |
Nadezha - Mother of 12-y-o Alexei
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Tamara Ogorodnikova | ... |
Nanny /
Neighbour /
Strange woman at the tea table
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Yuri Sventisov | ... |
Yuri Zhary
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Tamara Reshetnikova |
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Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy | ... |
Aleksei
(voice)
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Arseni Tarkovsky | ... |
Father
(voice)
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E. Del Bosque | ... |
A Spaniard
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The director mixes flashbacks, historical footage and original poetry to illustrate the reminiscences of a dying man about his childhood during World War II, adolescence, and a painful divorce in his family. The story interweaves reflections about Russian history and society. Written by <xaviermartin@hotmail.com>
I found this film quite difficult to get into since I'm more used to conventional plot driven narratives, a concept that was anathema to Tarkovsky. Certainly the Soviet authorities did their best to limit the venues where this film could be seen, condemning it's personal nature as decadent, self-indulgent and against the formal traditions of Soviet cinema, a cinema which Tarkovsky himself did not have a good word for. Russians who did see it sent many letters to the director saying how much it affected them and mirrored their own childhood experiences. Tarkovsky himself had difficulty in 'finding' his film during production, and originally worried that it would not work. Many critics questioned whether the images were symbolic in some way, but Tarkovsky dismissed symbolism as decadent. He sited Japanese writers of the middle ages rejecting such things. He had no time for surrealism either, pointing out that Dali himself had rejected the concept as facile. And yet the pull of dreams are un-mistakable in this work. Tarkovsky stated that the artist himself does not necessarily know the meaning of an image but is compelled to express his vision.
Despite some of the problems in viewing this film there are plenty of moving and mysterious moments, not least the wistful and melancholic look on the face of the mother as she lays in the grass, contemplating her children's future.