Mirror

I am just beyond moved with this rewatch especially watching it with my mother. One thing that always annoyed me as I got older was how my mom still treats me as a child, she still worries when I got out alone or who I'm meeting etc and although I understand she cares for me it's also not something I would say is easy or comfortable to deal with, sometimes its even heated but then I watched this for my third time and the ending as our protagonist's mother lay in the front of hee new house next to her newly wed husband and look to where her and her children would reside and that vision of her as a old woman walking through the heavy fields of life with her children in arms profoundly touched me beyond words, its as if premonition or simply a vision of the future sets in and thats when I realised as his son starts to play his role in his dying dreams and memories of his past that whats really going on in Mirror is a father realising why his mother was the woman she is and why even as he's grown older she still looks at him as a kid. It may not be Tarkovsky's intentions but thats how the film renders for me personally, truly and definitely near death's door he can't help but think about all the times he was a slip away from dropping into it; the burning house, the war and the violence he sees around him and thats why it sticks out so clearly to him yet whats the good in it? He can tell his son his story desperately as a last effort to make an impression on him before he passes but would it matter? Those papers ripped off of books in the past during the war that gets thrown off the balcony into a massive waste of streets and in the present where his son aimlessly flip through a large book without reading it, even if its preserved will he ever truly read it and understand the past or will he move ahead into the future even with much disapproval from his mother and by an extension can Russia move pass its past without the disapproval of those who had to live through it and now that they have children they can't help but remember their past but rendered through their children, their children in placement of them and thus fear and worries truly takes hold and the future is never more burdensome and scary, its the past that makes everything else feel painful and this time that really stuck with me. After the protagonist's conversation with his wife over their son, we get a sequence where him (played by their son) and his mother visits a woman out of nowhere and interacts with her for a bit, the woman shows her baby to the mother then afterwards pursade the mother to cut off the head of a chicken which quickly this violent act and its sinister ribble and implications is juxtaposed with the image of her pregnant, pure and him in her womb floating in between life and death much like the birds that lands on a child's head, crash through the window and ultimately with wigs broken is lifted up into the air by our dying protagonist but the part thats most significant is when casually to check his appearance the protagonist as a young boy with nothing better to do while waiting for his mother and the woman to finish their conversation shutted off to him looks at the mirror and not before look he focuses and I think in my interpretation this is where for the first time in his life he truly registers that "my god, I am a living being, I am alive, I have a face and I can't believe it" we all have that moment where it feels like suddenly we realised when we were really young that yes indeed we are alive and the reason this moment is so powerful is not just because of what it means but where it is placed in the story, maybe if this is him remembering soon after his conversation with his wife then looking though this lens this is him thinking about when his own son will have this moment of revelation, when he realised long after his father is dead that he is alive and it is so beautiful and painful and heartbreaking especially for the father who have nothing but his memories to hopefully see it in some form or another, after we are dead so are our memories and so what good are they? If they keep reminding of pain internally, nationally and emotionally? Its like the mirror, if one don't have it, have no way of seeing ourselves and what we look like how much will we know or can registers ourselves? Its funny how the first time I tried to watch Mirror I have to tried 3 times before I got to the end then after 2 rewatches it feels way faster then it used to be, almost exhaustingly fleeting just like memories. This is not a film just about capturing someone's life or showing it, its about being utterly absorbed into it and by the end its equally life affirming and speechlessly earth shaking. Anyways my mom was completely tortured by the experience and its now my favorite film of all time, Tarkovsky still profound as ever.