Tarkovsky before his death and a refined look at his legacy. Chris Marker began shooting this film when Andrei Tarkovsky did not yet know that he had cancer and would soon die, but this fact becomes the hook that I cling to.
This film is the only one that gives the opportunity to see the last months of Tarkovsky’s life.
In the first minutes of the film, for example, Tarkovsky with a very thin face lies in bed and his beloved son Andrew comes to his room. His son was released from the Soviet Union after years of rejection and only when it became known that his father was dying. Both are very happy with each other, but there is some awkwardness and understatement in their greeting. The son 20 years later will say that the greatest shock for him was precisely this moment of the meeting: the thinness and complexion it became clear that his father is seriously ill and it is not at all in some mild ailment with the lungs. The son was not told the truth, so as not to hurt him, but this “good lie”, judging by his interview in 2019, still brings him pain.
Marker then shows us Tarkovsky while working on his latest film, The Sacrifice, combining this footage from a set somewhere in Sweden with an interesting analysis of all his previous paintings. We see iconic footage from The Mirror, Andrey Rublev, Solaris, Ivanov of Childhood, Stalker, Nostalgia - the voiceover of Marina Vladi, who was herself a friend of Andrei Tarkovsky, brings to us Chris Marker's view of the cinema of a dying Soviet director. The value of Marker’s film is in the rarest shots of the last months of Tarkovsky, and in the extremely fascinating analysis of his paintings, images, visual signs.
So, amazingly, Tarkovsky dies literally in front of Chris Marker. I do not know what the author’s intention was when he began to shoot Tarkovsky while working on the Sacrifice, but he clearly could not even think that as a result he would show us Andrei Arsenyevich before his death.
"One day in the life of Andrei Arsenyevich" - an opportunity to see how Tarkovsky lives the last months in a Paris apartment, as he discusses with the cameraman Sven Nyukvist the editing of "Sacrifice" as, finally, for the first time watching a draft version of his last picture. An amazing attempt to look at the departing Tarkovsky and understand what we are, so to speak, losing.
8 out of 10