The film is all under the dome of some beautiful "Jerusalem light", and very serious. It's an amazing movie. You can’t say otherwise in the process of watching and remembering the film after.
About the careful human love of father to son, son to father. Exactly. Everyone seems to be talking as if in a dream. All actions are in real time.
Heroes of the picture. His father, under the age of 40, left the service after some serious circumstances, and he tries not to mention it. A handsome man, however, he does not insist on it. But he knows the power of his smile.
Son Alexei, a cadet of a military school, calls his future specialty - a military coach. At the level of society, father and son are more than adequate.
There is also a female presence. Alexei's favorite. With a gentle appearance, a girl, she conveys her feelings so that you can read her face and eyes.
If you do not have a “wash” in your head, as recommended by Sokurov himself, then the initial scene when Alexei is tormented by heavy dreams, and the father knows that these are heavy dreams, runs, rakes this son into his arms, rocks literally, and he is not alone, with terrible visions.
And it is clear that the only “intimate” in this scene is that the father does not allow the situation of this terrible state in his son. Everyone knows the feeling of pulling, not letting go for a long time, after an unpleasant sleep. It’s so simple: “Today was a dream... I almost killed you there...” - Again? . . Well, then someone wanted to hurt us. . Whisper water...try it... It's so easy to understand.
Oh, what dialogue! Do you know what the saints say about love? - Saints? Love. . Where did you read it? my father was amazed. The son-cadet speaks, as if defending something, but maybe he advises. . . Go to bed, that's all, please,' said the father.
Which I personally understood. If you mentally speed up the pace of the characters' speech, everything immediately becomes clear. Everything is wonderfully well received. A very male conversation takes place between them.
All manifestations of feelings are based on love. And comradely love is blessed, and father’s love is mentoring and saving, and love is sublime, grateful, and maybe this girl in warm beads, perhaps she feels a sense of love for this man, for Alexei’s father. It's possible. There are intersecting reactions, the father first noticed the girl in the window, coming to school to his son, and if the son with his beloved in a quarrel, it turns out, the girl for some reason went here for his father.
And yet, no one wants to offend anyone. Because they all feel each other at the highest level. The girl knows something about those photos that are carefully hidden in their house.
Alexei says to his father, “When I leave, you will marry.” . .
The film has a sublime, wonderful atmosphere, and it is achieved by the human attention of the characters to each other. The deep truth about the father’s front friend, the revelations, the action scenes on the ‘top tour’ between the houses, the conversation with the girl, and the scene with this kind, ridiculous Sank with the kitten – all sounds in the presence of Heaven.
Strange with the small number of people on the streets, a seaside city, a living city from the Past.
Classical, good traditions, European cinema.
The second film of Sokurov’s conventional trilogy about kindred love is already about the relationship between man and God and at the same time about the consubstantial: “Father and Son” is a theological parable that can be perceived as just a movie about human love. According to Christian dogmatics, not only God the Father and God the Son are consubstantial, but also people among themselves, especially relatives. Sokurov’s film now soars in symbolism, then lands in specifics, but this balance is not sustained, as in “Mother and Son” and other films by Sokurov and Arabov, “Father and Son” is set according to the script of Sergei Potepalov, and it cannot be recognized as fully successful.
The screenwriter, of course, focused on Arabov, on the parable volume of his images, but it came out imitatively and unoriginally, with all the secondaryity of the script, the editing form also harms the film: too many short plans, their docking is not smooth, cutting, deliberately, such a montage contradicts the meditative rhythm of most other Sokurov films, makes Father and Son more spectatorial, more accessible than it should be. At the same time, the actors play quite in a Sokurov way: bodily, convex, textured, outside the canons of performing psychology. As a result of this approach, the form of “Father and Son” came out very heterogeneous, the film did not form a single whole, although the symbolism was maintained throughout its length at a high level.
Directly pointing out, due to the mention of the gospel parable about the prodigal son and the thoughts of the saints about the love of father and son ("The Father's love is crucified, the love of the Son is crucified" - sounds twice in the film as a marker of the symbolic relations of the heroes), the story told in the film grows to a metaphor for the relationship between God and a person who believes in Him. The hero of Neymyshev is the so-called “permanent believer”, that is, one who, without experiencing shocks, remains with God all his life, although sometimes conflicts with Him. The hero of Lavrov is the prodigal son from the evangelical parable who lost touch with the Heavenly Father, he is tormented by a sense of guilt and sadness and, in fact, he is closer to God than the hero of Neymyshev, who has everything in order (not for nothing in one of the scenes he literally expels the hero of Lavrov, repeating the plot of the evangelical parable).
It is important that both heroes, father and son, are military, they have perfect, athletic bodies expressing their inner harmony, the physical similarity of Shchetinin and Neymyshev is designed to emphasize the consubstantial father and son. Surprisingly, the film does not have a Christological component, the hero of Neymyshev never fits into the metaphorical shell of Christ, and this is very indicative in terms of the half-heartedness of the symbols of “Father and Son”, its inconsistency, looseness, incompleteness (the picture “Mother and Son” succeeded precisely because Arabov and Sokurov removed all superfluous elements from it, including other actors).
In “Father and Son” there are a lot of heroes, albeit episodic, but very cluttering the picture, including a girl in whom the hero-son’s love is still not realized in any way – allegedly his father interferes. Although from the position of psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, the incorporation of the individual into the symbolic order, that is, into the cultural matrix of the Father's Law, just means his mental normality, his viability as an independent being, including in the sexual plane. To be fair, it is worth noting that Potepalov skillfully, perhaps unconsciously, uses the image of the army as an expression of fatherly hierarchy, order, discipline, law, as a metaphor for the organization of life.
It is important that the film takes place in the city, not in nature, as in “Mother and Son”, and besides in close proximity to heaven – on the roof, the screenwriter and director unconsciously express the truth of the psychoanalytic insights of Jacques Lacan about the relationship of children and their parents, which, in his opinion, is a metaphor for the relationship of man in general with Nature and Culture. “Father and Son” is interesting to watch only in one case – if you are familiar with structural psychoanalysis, otherwise the film seems, indeed, behind the ears attracted symbolism in contrast to the film “Mother and Son”, which has a lively specificity of human relations with a minimum of artistic means.
It was morning. The oily-yellow sunshine, infused with the intoxicating sweetness of the dew that sparkled with small diamond shards on the emerald fingers of the grass, poured lemon juice through the waking streets, squares, squares of the city by the sea, and inevitably penetrated the room in the attic, where two men, Father and Son, swirled in a slow dance of arms. And after the sun, a light silk sea breeze woke up from hibernation, rushing to the boulevards, to overhear the whispering of trees, the gentle rustle of leaves, the brisk gossip of canaries and the intimate dialogues of cooing pigeons. But even the wind, at the call of the sun’s glare, looked into this cozy world of the Father and the Son, for whom there was no other world around except this cramped room. The undisturbed and restless intimacy of touching each other’s hands, the delicate aroma of the skin, mixed with the salty taste of sweat and sea breeze. It's more than love. That never happens. Unexplained and inexplicable feeling of total affinity, unity of souls, bodies. One whole, Father and Son.
Alexander Sokurov is the undisputed poet of Death and Nonexistence. Life as a being, a noun, as the essence and sum of all human, he was not interested either in the trilogy about dictators, consisting of the films Moloch, Taurus and the Sun, nor in Faust, nor in the film Mother and Son, where the director painfully, tearfully showed his very gloomy view of the relationship between children and parents. With his thanatistic and sinister-meditative contemplation, Sokurov moved the chamber dramaturgical action of the film “Mother and Son” to the realm of the dead, where only relatives will be happy and peaceful.
What’s even more surprising is that the 2003 sequel, “Father and Son,” is completely devoid of darkness – both external and internal. Every frame of the film, perfected by the cameraman Alexander Burov to impressionistic modeling, to the dictatorship of the color scheme cast with a heavy tin of symbolism, where the beige essence of universal pacification (and it reigns in the film), and the yellow – the koler of God, whose breath is felt by each character of the film, is full of light, such a light that he blinds and captivates, as this alluring convention of what is happening will captivate. Where? When? Never mind.
As if deliberately rejecting the former themes of dying, decay, decay and destruction that dominate in his work, Sokurov in Father and Son creates a perfect form of poetry of cinematic language, forms an unusual dialectic of Life, scraping to the bone the reality that the director has always suffered from, but only in Father and Son for a while she was sick. The director with obvious pleasure admires the bodies of his characters - muscular overflows, silk overflows of skin, natural head turns, swings of hands, bends of legs - to emphasize that the picture is closed within Life, a kind of Paradise on Earth. That is why such a cult of flesh, body – healthy, alive, present. The cult that became a religion.
Syncretism is still characteristic of Sokurov; in this picture, where a coherent plot is dissolved in existential longing, in comatose, somnambulistic reification, echoes of both Christianity and Buddhism are clearly heard. The Father and the Son, whose names are not necessary and for them they do not matter, whether God is the Father preparing his Son for a great life, or whether these are some incarnations of all fathers and sons. Given the director’s passion for both Japanese and German philosophy, Being and Nothingness do not contradict each other, but complement each other. The father is preparing to go into nothingness, disappear into the fog of eternal nights, waiting for his eternal return, while the universe of the film can be concretized as the Being of nothingness, populated by the living, but only in the case of the film “Father and Son”. And Nature herself in this ribbon breathes fully; Sokurov at the same time obviously connects the nature of man, his carnal, with the nature around, saturating the film with shots of the blue sky, the far sea ... The director seems to encourage the audience to the beginning of his rebirth or even rebirth, which experience the Father and Son in the picture, about which very little is known.
There was once a mother in the lives of these men, but she died. Perhaps this Mother was the heroine of the movie “Mother and Son”. Once the Father was at war, he had seen many deaths, but he did not become hardened or angry. Yet for a long time he did not know his Son, his flesh, as did the Son of the Father. Sokurov’s polemics regarding Zvyagintsev’s Return with its leitmotif of the parable about the prodigal son, sounding here, but in the opposite context, are obvious. If in the film story of Zvyagintsev, the Father tried to understand his sons, going through the oriental spiritual and bodily torments, then in the film poem of Sokurov, the Father knows his Son so much, some of it is even possible. And that is the supreme Knowledge. It is as inexhaustible and infinite as the azure horizon that shines on the faces of the Father and the Son, as that inexhaustible love that forgives all and redeems all. Without this love of the Father and the Son, there is nothing meaningful in this world. It's prayer, sleep, prostration. As our Father, the Gospel of Sokurov is forbidden and beautiful.
I was like a bird. Like a bird that can fly. She walks on the ground,
Because it feels so good, but if it wants to... as soon as it wants, it will fly.
Mariam Petrosyan
By analogy with purgatory, which, according to the teachings of the Catholic Church, is a stage state of human souls between two extremes - hell and paradise, Sokurov's woven film canvases are an intermediate link between life and death, cinema and reality. Their location is not determined by the Cartesian coordinate system, they are not even three-dimensional - superdimensional. It is a model, an abstract representation of behavior, for revealing the deep human essence. Or an x-ray — a snapshot of what you can’t see with your eyes, “the same photo, only more frank — you can’t hide behind your skin or your muscles.” Whether it was, or dream, or real, or desired, or true, or fiction.
In "Father and Son," the director simulates a family relationship, or rather, the moment of initiation, when it is time for the two to let go of each other, because the child has become a man, and the parent can finally hear from him "the speech is not a boy, but a husband" and wish him with a clear conscience: "May good luck to you ahead of me." While in ordinary life, close people do not have enough time for each other, here, in the picture, the ideal variant of complicity, participation is shown - concentrate, impurities like essential oil. The fullness of the father with a son and son with a father is stronger than that of lovers, which caused critics to interpret different kinds. Kinesthetic director, Sokurov saturates the space not so much with eroticism as with tangible physicality. The tactile reception of the world moves beyond the threshold of the screen house: Alexei presses the warm beads of the girl to her cheek; now and then she puts her hand on the shoulders of a visitor; diligently, like a puppy barking on display for the owner, fights in front of the father watching him at a training session, but it is in the perimeter guarded by her father that she reaches apogee. Strokes, kisses, touches, hugs overwhelm both: here the son feels his father’s face, and then as if trying to transfer his features to himself; here the father’s hands once again tear the son out of a nightmare, calming, lulling, returning.
It's shrill. My family is different.
The web is tied to the lives of the movement.
The point is unchanged. The extra is taken away.
Remember the main law: the golden ratio.
(Lina Salnikova)
They clearly protect themselves and their “castle” with windows to the water and to the sky from strangers who, like Sana’a’s neighbor or a familiar young man looking for a “prodigal father”, are allowed to be “near”, but not with them. “Becoming a military man is a family thing. You will not understand this! – says Alexey to a friend who grew up with his mother, and even more acutely they are distinguished from the father of the men’s territory, where there is a place for barracks, football, homemade weights, but not women, from other cells of society. Representatives of the fair sex on the way of masculine heroes are vague highlights, alien creatures to become images materialized by Solaris. “You are always on your own, without me...” says the friend not in reproach to Alexei, but with the tired doom of Hari from the Tarkovsky film, adding: “Women are always older!” The men in the film often behave openly and guilelessly. Father and son, who do not fit into the circle of usual ("You saved me again"). "I love you." "You're handsome." "I love your smile," sounds unnatural. It is hardly correct to blame this undelivered diction of non-professional actors (perhaps they fake just because they are not taught to pretend?). And it is no longer their reprimand that shocks them, not their like apologetic, ingratiating smiles, not their carnal nudity during conversations - the nakedness of thoughts. It seems that realizing this for themselves, feeling awkward because of the voice of the most intimate, the main characters hide behind repeated conversations about trifles, for example, about food - one at a time like Chekhov's Ranevskaya in the middle of a monologue about the high jumps to the mundane: "God sees, I love my homeland, I love gently, I could not look out of the car, everything cried." (Through tears) However, you should drink coffee. And yet they are like people-birds, people-gods, Atlanteans, holding the heavenly vault on their shoulders: they walk on the roof, are not afraid of heights and idle gossip, hardy in body and sensitive in spirit.
Visual cameraman Alexander Burov and audio engineer Sergey Moshkov expand the boundaries of perception of the picture in the field of color and sound. On the film with the effect of sepia and the shade of the sunset come to life sketches Monet and Degas, stepping into which, you can easily catch yourself; leads to metaphysics a strange city on the hills.
The hills are our suffering.
The hills are our love.
The hills are screaming, weeping,
They leave, they come back.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... . .
You can always see the tops of them.
You can see it in the dark.
Yes, yesterday and now.
We are moving down the hill.
Death is only the plains.
Life is hills, hills.
(Joseph Brodsky)
Surrounded by an almost spiritual sound background of music, incessant talk, noises and whispers (not only to water), the characters themselves speak to say, not to speak. And when the time comes, the plot is ringed with a dialogue from the first frames in a mirror image, but now it announces that there is no separation, there is a huge meeting, about the fact that there is no separation.
How easy it is to breathe.
Because it is like a tree.
In someone’s life, someone else’s.
We are becoming light and shadow.
Or more than that.
Because we're going to lose everything.
When we run away, we become death and paradise.
(Joseph Brodsky)
Some directors make movies for everyone. Others for themselves. Third for his friends. Alexander Sokurov makes a movie for eternity. We cannot judge him by our immediate laws. It just won't work. And passion is what you want. For this reason, almost all prizes received by Sokurov’s paintings at international festivals are prizes of film critics’ associations. Because if they don't criticize these films, then why would they need them at all? I mean the critics, but I don’t consider myself one of them. And everything written in this text, please do not consider criticism.
The most characteristic feature of the so-called author’s cinema, the bright representative of which is Alexander Sokurov, is that it is fundamentally built according to other technological, aesthetic and dramatic laws than mass, commercial cinema. The author’s film is characterized by a smooth, narrative style of presentation of material, gradually filled with quotes, allusions, childhood memories, dreams and predictions. For such films to be perceived correctly, you usually need to be no more stupid than their creator. And not everyone does that. Even the critics. And to perceive these films, which is called “from your bell tower”, is extremely difficult, especially if it is “from a pot – two tips”. It is very easy to fall into an accusatory pathos towards the director, accusing him of tediousness, meaninglessness, boredom, incomprehensibility and even propaganda of homosexuality. And hell knows what else.
“Father and Son”, as well as Sokurov’s previous two films, “Molokh” and “Taurus”, is fondled by Cannes criticism and almost completely ignored at home. For reasons largely mentioned above. The history of a really strange and incomprehensible relationship between a young father and a rather adult son fell victim to the complexes of the film society. Children call this “who has what hurts.” But in fact, this is a movie about love, about the bitterness of losing a loved one, and about transferring feelings to this person to another. And the inevitable breakup. In short, a story about life and death, told by an unusual, unusual, but from this only more interesting (at least for your own horizon) film language.
9 out of 10
It was morning. The oily-yellow sunshine, infused with the intoxicating sweetness of the dew that sparkled with small diamond shards on the emerald fingers of the grass, poured lemon juice through the waking streets, squares, squares of the city by the sea, and inevitably penetrated the room in the attic, where two men, Father and Son, swirled in a slow dance of arms. And after the sun, a light silk sea breeze woke up from hibernation, rushing to the boulevards, to overhear the whispering of trees, the gentle rustle of leaves, the brisk gossip of canaries and the intimate dialogues of cooing pigeons. But even the wind, at the call of the sun’s glare, looked into this cozy world of the Father and the Son, for whom there was no other world around except this cramped room. The undisturbed and restless intimacy of touching each other’s hands, the delicate aroma of the skin, mixed with the salty taste of sweat and sea breeze. It's more than love. That never happens. Unexplained and inexplicable feeling of total affinity, unity of souls, bodies. One whole, Father and Son.
Alexander Sokurov is the undisputed poet of Death and Nonexistence. Life as a being, a noun, as the essence and sum of all human, he was not interested either in the trilogy about dictators, consisting of the films Moloch, Taurus and the Sun, nor in Faust, nor in the film Mother and Son, where the director painfully, tearfully showed his very gloomy view of the relationship between children and parents. With his thanatistic and sinister-meditative contemplation, Sokurov moved the chamber dramaturgical action of the film “Mother and Son” to the realm of the dead, where only relatives will be happy and peaceful.
What’s even more surprising is that the 2003 sequel, Father and Son, is completely devoid of darkness – both external and internal. Each frame of the film, perfected by the cameraman Alexander Burov to impressionistic modeling, to the dictatorship of the color scheme cast with a heavy tin of symbolism, where the beige essence of universal pacification (and it reigns in the film), and the yellow - the koler of God, whose breath is felt by each character of the film, is full of light, such a light that he blinds and captivates, as this alluring convention of what is happening will captivate. Where? When? Never mind.
As if deliberately rejecting the former themes of dying, decay, decay and destruction that dominate in his work, Sokurov in Father and Son creates a perfect form of poetry of cinematic language, forms an unusual dialectic of Life, scraping to the bone the reality that the director has always suffered from, but only in Father and Son for a while she was sick. The director with obvious pleasure admires the bodies of his characters - muscular overflows, silk overflows of skin, natural head turns, swings of hands, bends of legs - to emphasize that the picture is closed within Life, a kind of Paradise on Earth. That is why such a cult of flesh, body - healthy, alive, real. The cult that became a religion.
Syncretism is still characteristic of Sokurov; in this picture, where a coherent plot is dissolved in existential longing, in comatose, somnambulistic reification, echoes of both Christianity and Buddhism are clearly heard. The Father and the Son, whose names are not necessary and for them they are not important, is God the Father preparing his Son for a great life, or are these some incarnations of all fathers and sons. Given the director’s passion for both Japanese and German philosophy, Being and Nothingness do not contradict each other, but complement each other. The father is preparing to go into nothingness, disappear into the fog of eternal nights, waiting for his eternal return, while the universe of the film can be concretized as the Being of nothingness inhabited by the living, but only in the case of the film Father and Son. And Nature herself in this ribbon breathes fully; Sokurov at the same time obviously connects the nature of man, his carnal, with the nature around, saturating the film with shots of the blue sky, the far sea ... The director seems to encourage the audience to the beginning of his rebirth or even rebirth, which experience the Father and Son in the film, about which very little is known.
There was once a mother in the lives of these men, but she died. Perhaps this Mother was the heroine of the movie “Mother and Son”. Once the Father was at war, he had seen many deaths, but he did not become hardened or angry. Yet for a long time he did not know his Son, his flesh, as did the Son of the Father. Sokurov’s polemics regarding Zvyagintsev’s Return with its leitmotif of the parable about the prodigal son, sounding here, but in the opposite context, are obvious. If in the film story of Zvyagintsev, the Father tried to understand his sons, going through the oriental spiritual and bodily torments, then in the film poem of Sokurov, the Father knows his Son so much, some of it is even possible. And that is the supreme Knowledge. It is as inexhaustible and infinite as the azure horizon that shines on the faces of the Father and the Son, as that inexhaustible love that forgives all and redeems all. Without this love of the Father and the Son, there is nothing meaningful in this world. It's prayer, sleep, prostration. As our Father, the Gospel of Sokurov is forbidden and beautiful.
To be honest, I do not know what kind of review you can write on the film Sokurov "Father and Son", because the main storyline of the father's love for his son (and vice versa) in this case is far from the very word "the plot". After viewing this line is completely forgotten, but before my eyes is still a cloudy-sun picture that wraps this film up to the final credits. Landscapes are the main characters of this surreal tape. This is already against their background unfolding events, they are the main impetus for the development of relations between father and Alexei.
The roofs, the sun setting over the horizon, the open windows, the swinging sea - all this affects the viewer either beckoningly or lullingly. The picture is filled with a coastal salty aroma, and this is undoubtedly felt when viewed. We do not worry about the fight taking place in the house, we do not worry about the relationship of the heroes, when we know without words about their mutual harmony, we do not ooze and ach when our father slides on the roof. We feel only this light, which permeates the work of Sokurov, and we cannot take our eyes off it.
As for the relationship of the main characters: the synopsis, of course, is ambiguous, and you can interpret father-son relations in different ways. I will not think about this for a long time, because Sokurov in his interviews repeatedly expressed his idea that there can be no homosexual overtones and incest between the characters. But still the very first scene with the participation of naked father and Alexei says, as well as the episode when they stand face to face, says otherwise. Absolutely tolerant of all kinds of non-traditional relationships, especially in art-house tape, so to watch something incredible and think about what you are not close, is interesting.
In general, a rather interesting from an aesthetic point of view philosophical picture of the modern world, imbued with the spirit of mythology. I think that after a while it should be revised in order to rethink everything that the director wanted to convey to us. But too unprofessional play of the father (Andrey Shchetinin) too catches the eye than spoils the whole atmosphere of a beautiful film.
7 out of 10
Following “Mother and Son”, Sokurov decided to release a tape dedicated to the relationship of his son with his father – to close the topic completely. Perhaps the motivation for Alexander Nikolaich was the desire to solve personal issues of relations with parents. At any rate, there is no concept which, by cementing the parts of a formal dilogy, would legitimize it. But it doesn't matter. The important thing is that the transmission of a complex, multi-vector mechanism of interaction between two people, the image of an invisible thread stretching between their souls is Sokurov’s horse, here he is an unsurpassed master (something close he saw only in Tarkovsky (I am not about the manner of shooting) and Alejandro Iñárritu), and the film “Father and Son” once again confirms this. The very word “relationship” is too blurred and everyday to correspond to the depth of Sokurov’s immersion – let’s leave it for unassuming melodramas. Everything here is too specific; you have to get used to such a movie, love it - but it is undoubtedly necessary.
Comparing the two films - "Mother" and "Father" (for simplicity, we will call them so) - it is difficult to unequivocally give any preference. Visually much more attractive “Father” ("Mother) was filmed, apparently, on a very meager budget. It is also more “cinema”, plot. That is, the plot is simple, and there are only five actors, but in comparison with the two characters and the almost complete absence of the plot, “Mother” has already progressed. But the course of action, the feelings that the characters feel (in other words, the essence of these notorious “relationships”) in “Mother” was much clearer for me – they are quite realistic there, no matter how strange this word sounds in relation to the parable film. In "Father," these feelings are multifaceted to the point of colic in the abdomen - and, in a good way, hopelessly confused. Surprisingly, this was manifested in the dialogues: it seems to sound clear words, coherent lines, but to embrace the thought of the hero as a whole is often not possible. It is as if you are speaking a foreign language, like Bulgarian. Of course, there is always the option to read a message from the general atmosphere, but personally I manage to do this only to some extent – it is desirable to still “enter” what is happening.
However, the “incomprehensibility” of the film is easy to understand and forgive, if you imagine that it is just a fantasy about what never was and never will be. “Hint” in the scenery: did Russian-speaking people ever live in a subtropical Mediterranean town (the film was shot in Lisbon) with signature winding streets, Arab flat roofs, historical trams, etc.? Nope. This immediately places the story outside the usual space-time continuum (color gamma sepia is another attribute of otherworldliness). Similarly, there is no such wonderfully close relationship between father and son (if we are talking about mentally healthy people). In general, all the characters treat each other tenderly - this also does not happen, although everyone says that love for others is sacred (in developed countries and for much less tenderness you can pay under the article "sexual harassment"). The two protagonists, the Father and the Son, do not look like real people at all, they are some ancient deities, mighty giants, whose body and spirit are equally beautiful and majestic, who live in complete harmony with themselves and with the world around them (even the sad ending does not convince me otherwise). It seems as if in one of the past incarnations Sokurov was an ancient Greek, and in a dream before him vaguely appear memories of that life. In such a context, does it not matter that the characters sometimes utter real galimatia?
Speaking of dreams. The American press calls some of its science fiction writers “visionaries”, which means not just a person who has visions, but an author who imitates visions in his works. In this sense, Sokurov is a visionary, every film is a dream in reality. Sophisticated directorial technique, nurtured from film to film, is truly unique - only for the sake of this opportunity to dream it is worth reading his opuses. I would add additional tags to Father and Son, because, due to the specifics of the narrative described above, it is difficult to perceive it as a linear story - the whole falls into a mosaic of individual, flawlessly shot episodes. So, this is a symphony film - that is, not a musical one (although the wonderful background music does not stop for 82 minutes), but a video symphony, where the camera, actors and editing "scissors" act as instruments of the orchestra. And even -- a movie clip. With the three-minute video clips for the songs “Father and Son”, the main function is related: this series of colorful and aesthetic pictures, first of all, caresses the viewer’s eye. And nothing more?
7 out of 10
A movie that doesn’t have a heart, not even a big one. And words are not enough. Not because you have a lot to say, but because you have to say the unsaid.
This movie isn't exactly human. But not quite what is called the ideal dreams of the author, set by the conviction and faith of the formula of the Father and the Son. And not only the characters of the dream (with a dream movie is often compared - which is true and wrong, in my opinion). We have souls without clothes, muscles, bodies, everything that hides them. Heroes x-rays. Covers of dresses and flesh are simply not noticed when the eyes open and sounds, appearing as if out of thin air, an enthusiastic whisper. How can you imagine that people look and say that, I don’t understand? I still don’t know how to show it, how to show it. To more accurately define the heroes, I will take a few words from Vasily Rozanov. “The human soul trembles like the ray of God.” “Wings in the shower. Flying wings”. Trembling, flight, rustling, winginess, radiance of souls - this is the feeling of Sokurov images.
Many people are shocked by the first scene of the film. Eroticism, the prohibition of too close a man's embrace. Shock, yeah. But he's different. Here souls tremble in arms, love for love is pressed, not bodies - hearts merge into one whole, so firmly that even apart will not lose unity. It seems impossible to show and see. Only such love for a person is real, not diminished against the being of love and its task, where the lover does not completely separate himself in thought and does not divide himself, as it were, in the very blood and nerves from the beloved. But the miracle is that it is not written, but can be seen by Sokurov, shown to them visually to tears! And he made it harder for himself. He chose the most dissimilar actors for the roles of his son and father, as if Alyosha was a son not by blood, as if blood ties were not the main one. And most importantly - inseparability in thoughts, blood, nerves. Indivisibility. A strange conclusion from history, whose essence is the preparation for separation, the necessity, the pattern and the victim of the separation of son and father? The father to the son: “You, yourself, yourself. Take care of yourself.
It's just separation from separation. Sasha, a friend of Alexei, asks him: “Take me to you, I am good.” Alexey: “Don’t be sad, Sanya, you are close, we are together.” Sanya thoughtfully looks at him and says, his loneliness says: “Together, only nearby.” Strange phrase? But accurate! You can be together in different ways. Some people live together, close by. And some, as in the above quote, together — not divided. Not near (near, near, near), but inside. The first scene of the film just demonstrates this - the interpenetration of souls.
It turns out that the film about the eternal and inevitable separation of father and son is actually a film about their eternal meeting, in spring and winter, in reality and sleep, in the memory of the past and forebodings of the future, in a woman (mother / beloved) and God, in heaven and on earth, in life and death. Because true love is not separation in separation, not loss in loss, and the former it is not. How do you say “was” or “was” about your mother? There's something unnatural about it, bad about it. And the young man in the film who does not have a father, he is looking for him, as if he is, and was not.
And the ending seems sad. Father in sleep and in winter. And he tells his son, "You're not here," as if he were saying, "I'm not here anymore." A prophetic vision. And at the same time, come out. Because it's bound to be. Father will leave. One. One. Leaving my son. And leaving him the world. But the oneness of souls will not disappear. It will continue.
Sokurov has an amazing ability to soften, soften, caress, undead. Colors, lights, smiles, quiet whispers, rustling wings of the soul. And even pain! “If a man, he hurts all his life” (the words of his father in the film). Sokurov hurts in every film, in every frame. Only this pain is felt and experienced strangely tenderly, as in the epiphany of St. Cunigunda: “Pain is a true word, pain is a kind word, pain is a merciful word.” And when the son, the ray of his eyes, pronounces the Christian maxim: “The love of the Father is crucifying.” The love of the Son is crucified, we feel in these words not tragedy at all, not fear, suffering, separation, but love (and the one who fears, as the Bible says, is imperfect in love).
And a little more from Rozanov, his words, honestly, are not enough for this movie. Which is higher, love or love stories? All “love stories” are not worth a piece of “love now.” Sokurov, I think, could never make a love story. But he knows how to give love now. Without fiction, without the effect of striving from beginning to end, without dependence on the plot. His heroes-souls seem to be beyond time and cause, immersed in eternal life, in the realm of God’s grace (that is probably where the dream effect comes from), and absolutely all their actions (even awkward) and words (even unspoken) are expressions, manifestations of love. The love that is now forever.
On the top floor, under the roof of the old house, two people live - a father and a son. After the death of his wife and mother, they have been together for many years in their closed and isolated world of feelings and memories. A father cannot imagine life without a son, who, in turn, loves his father faithfully, just like a kitten. Outwardly, they are not at all similar to each other, and the father next to the adult son even somehow suspiciously young.
Therefore, sometimes they seem to be brothers, and sometimes lovers, because from time to time they confess to each other in warm mutual love. Their faces are often close, touches are tender and almost erotic, but their views express a certain doom rather than happiness. Moreover, the father suffers greatly due to the fact that the son cannot sit on his neck all his life (this literally expresses the frame from the poster of the film and from the cassette cover, on which the son, beaming with happiness, sits on his father’s shoulders).
Therefore, the father must leave, freeing his son the way to another love. But it seems that their ties will not break. They have already become two halves of one whole, in which time does not matter (the modern spotted soldier's uniform easily coexists with radios of the middle of the last century) and the scene (the house in which the heroes live, was filmed in St. Petersburg and Lisbon). In addition, the mixture of Russian speech and clearly not our seascape creates a feeling of some artificiality, almost unreality - to the point of insanity of a beautiful and mysterious landscape.
The space for various interpretations turned out to be so great this time that even the past – controversial and ambiguous – paintings by Alexander Sokurov seem to be arithmetic for elementary schools against the background of this opus. The immodest manifestation of the mutual feelings of father and son here resulted in something so frank that many, not without reason, tried on incest.
And although the director insisted in his numerous interviews that the film is exclusively about immaculate love (and hinted that every thought takes the volume of the head into which it falls), still does not leave the feeling that the “freedom of speculation” was provoked by an elementary violation of the sense of proportion, which led to ambiguity of interpretations.
And no matter how the director does not disavow the “poor hints”, do not forget that in “Sorrowful Insensibility”, it was he who, the first in our cinema, in 1986, showed the scene of lesbian relations. Another explanation for the "doubtful result" may be that Sokurov refused to cooperate with his permanent co-author Yuri Arabov in this project. Perhaps that is why the conflict between word and image has escalated to the point where it has caused an inadequate response.
On the one hand, the fabulously beautiful beige picture is flooded with a gentle magic light, on the other hand, the absolute unnaturalness of ugly and awkward dialogues. On the one hand, Sokurov’s signature melancholy-meditative narrative, on the other hand, the conspicuous inconsistency of actors-students who move like somnambulists and pronounce words with apparent tension. On the one hand there is a frank ethical aggravation, on the other there is a vague intrigue and phrases like: “Your body reminds me of a tree!” On the one hand – spiritualized minimalist fantasies on the themes of Tchaikovsky, on the other – extremely artificial mise-en-scene and gestures constantly touching each other father and son.
As a result, the almost ancient Greek joy of naked male torsos is replaced by intimacy, strongly reminiscent of latent homosexual cravings. Sokurov has never come so close to the line between genius and profanation and spirituality and paraphilia. To consider this a love story of the closest relatives prevents the level of convention chosen by the director - either sincere to obscenity, or obscene to sincerity.
The complexes of the mysterious Russian soul this time turned out to be so deeply individual that they look exceptionally exotic. Especially for Russia itself, where such a view of the relationship between fathers and children is, to put it mildly, nonsense. These two are so self-sufficient, and their relationship is so closed, that it was very difficult to even penetrate them, let alone empathize with them. This, however, did not prevent the picture not only to get into the competition of the most prestigious - the Cannes Festival, but also to receive the Critics' Award (FIPRESSI).
