Notes on the Alexander Sokurov Retro

A young man comes home after a civil war stint and marries a medical student. Effectively suffused with sickness, poverty and loss - the middle reel seems missing, too - it's not surprising that this was once banned by the USSR. Dedicated to and recalls shotmaking by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Watching MOURNFUL INDIFFERENCE after DAYS OF THE ECLIPSE, MOTHER AND SON, MOLOCH and even THE LONELY VOICE OF MAN is a bit of a shock to the system with its stylized acting and camera movements. Thi is an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House that goes soft in its critique of the hermetic bourgeoisie and the warring world they'd rather ignore. The bourgeois' full-blown indulgence may have drawn Sokurov's sympathy, perhaps not surprisingly given his own tendencies later on.

On its own, a not very useful documentary on Andrei Tarkovsky, and particularly useless if you've seen Chris Marker's superior ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF ANDREI ARSENEVICH. Sokurov's admiration of Tarkovsky is clear; he is unhesitant in describing the awe of those who had worked with him, and for those of us who never had the opportunity, Sokurov seems satisfied to linger on Tarkovsky's former residences (a washbasin, even), expecting awe in absence.

This is Madame Bovary on hallucinogens. Sokurov runs with the ball on his source text even moreso than in MOURNFUL INDIFFERENCE. I'll surmise that Sokurov finds the romantic yet doomed Emma Bovary a kindred spirit, and I'll even add that Sokurov has a lot of fun (yes - "Sokurov" and "fun" together in one sentence!) as Emma's lifestyle choice spins out of her grasp. Eras, languages and visual scale are conflated, and there's a sexual candor previously unseen in Sokurov's depictions of Emma's fantasy life.

"Lucky are the nearest and dearest who have died before us," says THE SECOND CIRCLE at its end. Indeed, after watching THE SECOND CIRCLE, one would probably cringe at the indignities Sokurov has in mind for the dead and their mourning in the third circle and beyond. Here a grieving son is subjected to humiliations ranging from the expected comic Soviet bureaucracy to active spite from the local funeral organizer. The dynamism it achieves when two people are onscreen makes one hopeful for Sokurov's actor-handling skills (update: this hope was dashed after seeing WHISPERING PAGES). His hand at visuals has always been more certain, and here he achieves moments of expressionism that he'll bring past the threshold in MOTHER AND SON.

This is Sokurov's Romanticism in full blossom, complete with smoky-throated narrator intoning over spare smoky landscapes. This sensibility betrays a misguided Orientalism. A man journeys to an island/afterlife and comes up empty-handed - and so do we - after needling its Japanese inhabitants questions such as, "Why is there so much sadness in poetry?"

This lone wolf cousin to ORIENTAL ELEGY's Romanticism achieves a certain zen. Solitude impresses Sokurov. It's easy to see Sokurov seeing himself (just as he did in Emma Bovary) in the lone old Japanese woman he follows around in her isolated mountain home. Impressive in how it manages to capture many tones of gray, visually (impressive since this was shot on video) and literally.