We've seen three Andrei Tarkovsky films before - his first film, Ivan's Childhood, which is certainly beautiful and bleak, and which I think he later regarded as too flashy/too accessible, and his two science fiction epics, Solaris and STALKER. This one comes right between those two, and certainly doesn't suffer from being too accessible. You see vignettes in the life of, well, I'm honestly not sure. The main character is a woman (played by Margarita Terekhova), who alternates between looking strikingly beautiful
and haggard, depending on how she's shot, and who both plays the wife of (possibly) the main character, whom we never see (or at least, I don't think we do), although we do see through his eyes and hear his voice when he's arguing with her, and also the same person's mother, earlier in time (the 1930's). Here she is noticing the resemblance:
Things happen, small vignettes - the mother runs to her job at a printing press, convinced that an obscene (I think) word has somehow got into a print run (it hasn't).
A barn burns down next to their house in the country when (I think) our hero is a child. A person who calls himself a doctor turns up at (the same?) house in the country (the scene in the poster is the mother/wife watching him from a distance) and sits on the fence with her, and breaks it, and then walks off.
The mother shows up at another woman's house in the country having walked ten miles with her older son (our hero, Ignat, aged about 12) and asks for help with feminine problems. While she and the other woman go into the back room, Ignat sits and watches a light go out. That sort of thing. Normally I would hate this sort of thing. I can't sit still for Koyaanisqatsi. Jami got seriously antsy. But it held my interest by sheer force of being hypnotically beautiful. Like STALKER it mixes black and white and color film, but not for any clear reason I could see. There was also old Soviet news footage (or a very good facsimile) mixed in. I will have to read up on the film to see if I can understand the underlying events (I think our main character ends up dying of some disease?) but it is possible just to enjoy it as art for art's sake. And some images, like the barn burning down in the rain, are indelible.
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