by Nick Cave
A friend invited me to attend a screening of a Russian film in Soho. I asked what it was like and he replied: "Well, actually nothing happens, and then someone dies. Come along. You'll love it." My friend was distributing the film in the U.S., so I felt obligated. Attend a Russian film is the kind of things that are done by friends.
I arrived late and sat in the front row at the end of the credits. Ten minutes later, I started crying and continued crying quietly during the 73 minute duration of the film. I cried in movies before, but I can not remember crying so much, without pause, all the time. When the film ended and the lights came on, a woman with eyes bloodshot red, sitting behind me, waved a kleenex in my direction and asked me if I would write something about it for a newspaper.
The film is called Mother and Son and is directed by Alexander Sokurov. Mother and Son explores the last day in the life of a dying mother (Gudrun Geyer) and her adult son (Alexei Anaishnov). It's morning. The mother wants her son to take her for a "walk", which means that he holds her through a series of idyllic landscapes, after he returns to their simple and isolated home, feeds her, and puts her to bed. Then the child moves away from the house take a walk alone and returns to find that she died. All this in 73 minutes.
But what we witnessed during this time is a thing of such beauty, such sadness, to cry for me, was the only appropriate response. Mother and Son is a film about death, about love and about Grace The love between a mother and her son, transcends ordinary love that which is purified by the imminence of death. Death awaits them both with absolute certainty: the mother who will die, the child will be left alone. Time seems to have slowed respectfully to a pace at which the careful movement of love has room for your: no action is rushed, that would simply hasten death. The characters have achieved a state of emotional and spiritual grace. Seem to stray from their stories, strange environment and immune to the world that is beyond their own world. All that exists are gestures of comfort, care and affection. The child's mother brush her hair, cuddle blanket around her, give him something to eat for a bottle teat. The mother responds with caresses and fondling everything that allows her failing strength. In a sense, is a relationship that should not be seen. It is sacred, religious, without the hassle of prurient intrusions analysis of the twentieth century. It is a vision of humanity that it becomes truly transcendent, yet Sokurov does not avoid the tragic nature of death. Death hangs heavy over everything, grieving every gesture, down each action. Even the landscape seems to be in mourning for the mother's imminent demise. Here we see the Passion, shown in tables, occasionally reflecting the story of Christ's passion, not the ailing mother but the son, not of dying but of what is left behind.
The dialogue seems strangely ineffective, as if love and understanding of the protagonists become unnecessary language. When they talk, it seems to lack a real sense their words. They do not comfort or clarify, because everything is said in the knowledge contained in each gesture. In the words psychology there, complications and pain. What is particularly evident in the final conversation, they discuss reasons for death and reasons for living. The dialogue is futile and cruel and only serve to rekindle grief.
Says the mother: "It's so sad. On top you have to go through what I suffered. It's so unfair."
"a little nap, mother," says the son. "I'll be right back."
son leaves home and moves into the exquisite landscape that surrounds it. It is in these long sequences, lengthy, almost immobile, the film reaches the heights of the most breathtaking beauty. Sokurov's landscapes are not burdened by any desire for realism. Her plans are turned into film screens, far closer to the act of painting than to film, flooded with artificial light cloudy. These views chimeric recall the work of German Romantic painters of the early nineteenth century, the Caspar David Friedrich, in which everything is softened by a milky glow. The vastness and mystery of this nature creates a high spirituality regardless of any formula of traditional Christianity. And the care Sokurov implementing these plans worked skillfully finds its echo in the carefully with which his characters treat one another - the devotion to detail, the unhurried tenderness, love.
All this beauty has a pace, a time scale dictated by the encroachment of death. Each piece of action, every gesture - slow, plaintive, important, sacred - allows the viewer the time to fall under its spell and to be seduced by its powerful impulses and very serious. Watching this film, we are forced to confront us with the inevitability of our own mortality and the mortality of others.
Emotions are aroused in us a second so long absent from the cinema. My first
resposta a este filme pela tristeza faith derramar lágrimas das Coisas. E não tem sua única vibração deixado of ECOAR desde então em mim.
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