MOTHER AND SON

***^{1/2 out of} ****

Breathtakingly beautiful

Alexandr Sokurov's latest film is definitely not for everyone. Those who cringe at the sound of art house should best stay away. It will even alienate those of the art house persuasion who, for example, saw Hirokazu Kore-eda's MABOROSI and regretted it afterwards. Both films deal with death and what follows by using careful, lingering visuals instead of words, silences inviting contemplation - cinema distilled almost to a visual essence.

MOTHER AND SON is even sparer than MABOROSI in narrative; a son attends to his dying mother - he carries her outside into the most sombre of autumn days, he brings out an album to share, they converse briefly before she falls into somnolence, he grieves while alone in the woods.

Here, what is not spoken but felt is instead seen and suggested. MOTHER AND SON is quite literally the most atmospheric film I've seen in recent memory, and easily among the most beautiful.  It is Sokurov's most painterly film yet and how he does it (using customized lenses and such with cinematographer Alexi Fyodorov) is a secret he is apparently unwilling to share. I'll leave the magician be with his secrets but his show is a thing to relish. Every shot seems suffused, every grain of film used and loaded, the air weighty with light and fog. Lit areas glow. Proportions err - nothing seems right. It is as if dread has filtered what we are seeing.

MOTHER AND SON was supposedly inspired visually by the canvases of German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich but it really is far more painterly and, with death's pall present, tinged with an edgy psychology.  

One scene is particularly inspired: a moth rests on an unmoving arm, and it survives the indifferent sweep of a passing hand, remaining steadfast. Grief will be endured especially when abetted by beauty such as this. A-

MOTHER AND SON (MAT' I SYN)

Directed by: Alexandr Sokurov

Written by: Yuri Arabov

Russia, 1997.

Review completed on September 21, 1997.