History of Dante and Beatrice The film captured me from the first frames of the main character’s meditation, and two hours flew by in one breath. In the end, however, one question hangs in the air: “What was that?” A few days from the life of the 'factory guy' were presented, told in the first person. And maybe it's just whose eyes do we see? Perhaps we are dealing with an “unreliable storyteller,” and we are confronted with a distorted reality caused by the painful condition of the hero who cannot accept the loss of a loved one. If we look at events from this point of view, individual details fall into place and no longer seem “strange.”
The film is almost entirely black and white, and this decision only adds to the film’s effect. Pain, loneliness and a sense of loss permeate the whole flesh of this film, which is expressed in the wonderful musical accompaniment (even the sounding songs on the poems of Joseph Brodsky and Arseny Tarkovsky are involved in the description of the events), and in the lace of artistic images. The hero constantly mentally returns to one day of his past life, ritually changing "white" and "black" clothes, and his beloved is compared to him with a bird that withered into the sky. By the way, in this interpretation, the girl’s strange reaction becomes clear when the hero asks her a simple question: “Why don’t you come with me?”
The intermediate state of the first frame does not make it clear whether the hero falls asleep at this moment, or, conversely, wakes up; his inactivity, the invariable route is as if they are constituent memories, beyond which he cannot go, and which is like a dream: when you want to do something, for unknown reasons you can not, or you can, but for some reason you do not do it. And then the states of reality and sleep, poetry, thoughts and desires of the hero are intertwined and become something that is difficult to separate from each other.
Despite the fact that the film contains a lot of dark images, it does not create a sense of hopelessness, but, on the contrary, it smells of some illogical optimism that penetrates into you in the sensual plane. Bright colors and comedic situations look very expressive against the general background.
All the persons encountered by the main character on the way, of course, are overlooked through the prism of his subjective perception of reality; and, being independent personalities, carry within themselves the reflection of his thoughts. To cure the hero from longing for his beloved, the doctor gives him a gift of poetry. What kind of book is in his hands? Do we hear the passages in his head from there, or are they also distorted by the perception of the hero reading something different? Perhaps this is the beginning of his career as a poet?
As for his personal life, in the “chess of love”, the hero is offered a choice between “Mind” and “Senses”, and he finds himself in a zugzwang, for Death will certainly make the next move. Here it becomes clear why the chessboard has only 25 cells. 'Earth life, halfway through, I found myself in a gloomy forest...' Why doesn't anyone call a hero by his name? Maybe it's because it's mentioned quite often in the movie?