Synopsis: Man sacrifices everything to save the world (I think!!)
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Actors: Erland Josephson, Susan Fleetwood
Date: 1986
How viewed: lovefilm rental
Rating: 3/5
David Meyer says:
.. beautiful, miraculous and almost indescribably slow.
I say:
I try not to read other reviews before I see these films and write my comments, and the phrase I struggled to find for this film was 'a meditation', which I subsequently found David Meyer also uses. It's a meditation on life, the universe and everything, and you probably need to get into some sort of meditative state before sitting down for nearly two and a half hours and watching this (drugs might help!) Nevertheless it is a stunning film, although everything is taken at snail's pace. It's almost impossible to determine exactly what is going on - a writer lives with his family in an isolated house by lake in Scandinavia, and on his birthday, when a few friends gather, news comes on the radio that war has broken out, and he makes a bargain with God to restore things to normal if he sacrifices everything, which he does, and normality is restored). There are lots of monologues, languorous long shots of the landscape, and a spectacular fire to enjoy, and bizarrely, it reminded me of '2001' - and that slow motion ballet of spaceships etc...
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