Cast: Gudrun Geyer, Alexei Ananishnov

Director: Alexander Sokurov

Screenplay: Yuri Arabov

Running time: 1 hr 13 mins

Genre: Drama/Foreign Film



CRITIQUE:


Russian master-auteur Alexander Sokurov’s first foray into his proposed ‘family trilogy’, Mother and Son, at its slow, palpitating heart – is like watching death in slow motion. The emasculating, numbing pain of losing a loved one, the gentle decay of human life, a mother’s wordless waltz into mortality and a son’s difficult farewell; all of these dark, depressing subject matters are used to an elegant, meditative foil to Sokurov’s masterly visual palette, frames tinted with amberish glow, oft skewed angles, warped planes of fields, and blurry edges. This paints an elegiac look into a nostalgic world of a distant countryside peopled by two human beings that feel so familiar to our existence. The result is a universal exploration of tragedy, told in an unhurried, dialogue-restrained narrative: a dying mother is afraid to vanish in the world, a son finds it hard to let go; to anyone who understands the endless theme of a mother’s undying love to a son, and vice versa, will find this moving and poignant. And for those who lacks depth, or finds it hard to take in cinematic artforms, stay far away from this. As an arthouse piece, there’s more philosophising and aestheticising over mere plotting, emotions are implicit rather than explicit. We are shown more than being told. Hence its achingly beautiful use of visuals like a painter’s work, Sokurov using all sorts of lenses, glasses, blurred optics, fish-eyes to capture a surrealistic world, and the glorious capture of natural sounds, the howling wind, a snap of thunder, the echoes in the air like ghosts whispering – and that excruciating beauty of a crop field swaying and dancing along the sweeping gales. Morbidity aside, this is death seen as a something perennial, natural and an exquisite fading of humanity.


VERDICT:

One has to appreciate Sokurov for daring to be distinctive in his cinematic art-form, peerless from his monotonous contemporaries – a philosopher in his storytelling, a painter in his visual canvas, a poet in his misé-en-scene. Mother and Son is an achingly heartrending exploration on human sorrow.




RATING: A-