Mirror

Look, I get it. When people use the phrase “artsy-fartsy”, this is pretty much the exact movie they have in mind. It’s the final boss. It’s glacially slow, it doesn’t really have a story, I’d be hard pressed to say anything “happens” in it, it’s full of obscure imagery, it contains long sequences in which equally obscure, abstractly related poetry is read out over said imagery, it switches freely between different time periods in which the same actors portray similar characters to make it extra hard to situate yourself, there are extended cut-ins of archival historical footage that are only somewhat connected to the dramatic happenings, and the whole thing is austere and remote and brown-toned in exactly the way you’d imagine an icy art film might be. It’s been called a puzzle box with no solution; I’d argue that no solution could be as beautiful and evocative as the puzzle itself.  “Getting it” is great and all. But to me, the best and most profound response any work of art can get out me is a feeling of being inexplicably drawn to it without really knowing why, like a sort of hypnosis. Just something in the wind that can’t be put into concrete words; all you know is what happens in your brain as you experience it, like it’s hit upon some ancient frequency buried deep within you. For me, Mirror produces that instinctual draw stronger than just about any film not directed by David Lynch. It’s about a lot of things - the mysterious relationship one has to their mother, the intertwining of the historical and the personal, the eerily fuzzy lines between generations - but most of all it’s about the rhythms of memory and the subconscious. Plenty of films are about those things, but this commits to that abstract flow in its construction more than any of them that I’m aware of. But even that isn’t quite what gets it so deep into my head. What gets it there is the way it not only illuminates the nostalgic, or peaceful, or mundane corners of memory, but of the surreal, the dreamlike, the eerie, the images that stick in one’s brain and swirl around and become more bizarre and uncanny the further away from which you look at them, warped by years of regret and reflection. Maybe the impossibility of “understanding” this film reflects the impossibility of “understanding” one’s own life and memories. I don’t care to write any more than that - I’ve diluted it enough already. I don’t think I’ll ever fully “figure it out”, because I don’t think anyone can, maybe not even Tarkovsky. Somehow, in this case, I find that comforting rather than frustrating: I don’t want the essential mystery that attracts me to it to go away. A lot of the five-star reviews on here are written rather obscurely, so to put things down to earth-ly - I very much like what happens in my brain while this movie enters my eyes and ears, and I experience its slippery, abstract sense of time. It’s the most beautiful movie I’ve ever seen, I think, not just in the way individual images look, but in the way they live and breathe and move from one to the next and accumulate, and the mysterious soundscapes they’re put over. It’s infinite, inexhaustible. It even provides its own review: “Words can’t express everything a person feels. It’s like they’re too… feeble.”