There’s a hard truth that comes with reviewing films that are not in current release, and that is that there isn’t exactly any pre-established interest or innate sense of urgency in your work. People may read it and be convinced to see or avoid a certain film, but for the most part they didn’t log on to the internet specifically to see what you had to say about a particular picture. For the most part, the book has already been written on the material I’m covering, and while I’m fine with that, like every writer I secretly long to change someone’s opinion (read: life) with my scrawl. This is a problem when it comes to pictures such as Aleksandr Sokurov’s Mother and Son (1997).
It’s likely that if you’ve heard of the film you’re either tackling this list along with me, or you are a film nerd of incredible nerdiness who already knows that it is a slow, somewhat dreamlike meditation on death that concerns (SPOILER ALERT!) a mother and her son. There isn’t anything I could write in this post that would convince someone who’d never heard of the movie to seek it out, or to prevent someone whose looking it up from wasting their time on it. Is it slow? Incredibly. Is it murky and understated? It’s a contemporary Russian film on the 1001 list so I’m gonna bet that you readers already know that it is. Is it moving? Somewhat, and for Sokurov’s purposes I’m certain that it hits the mark.
However, I didn’t come away from this film with any startling revelation, nor was I particularly shaken by its portrayal of loyalty even in death. It runs just short of an hour and 15 minutes, and in that time VERY little happens. The adult son cares for his mother as she dies. I’m not going to ceaselessly pan it because it’s quite good for what it is, but it isn’t a film of actions or biting dialogue. You get pretty much what the title describes. Two people who know that they will soon be separated by death discuss memories and loss, and eventually they seem to come to terms with what is going to happen.
The love between them is portrayed well by leads Aleksei Ananishnov and Gudrun Geyer, and the emotion they display feels genuine, if a bit overly dramatic. This is likely due to the fact that the film is composed of so many close-ups of the two eponymous figures. The notable exception is the scene in which the son goes for a walk while his mother sleeps. He meanders through woods and along dirt roads, and seems to be looking only for reprieve from the gravity of his mother’s demise.
Mother and Son isn’t a terrible film, but it isn’t conventional in any sense. For the most part, movies glance over death, making it a footnote to the greater accomplishments of characters or the progression of narrative. This film lingers on death, reminding me of the way Ingmar Bergman approached the subject. There’s nowhere to hide from it in this picture. But death isn’t exciting, and movies that exploit it as such usually aren’t either. Death is often a slow, painful, and even boring process, and that’s what Sokurov ultimately gives us here. If that sounds like your particular cinematic cup of tea, by all means drink up.
Language: Russian
Runtime: 73 Minutes
Available with English subtitles @youtube.com
Grade: 1.5 Hats Off
