The Sacrifice (15.)
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.
Starring Erland Josephson, Susan Fleetwood, Valeire Mairesse, Allan Edwall, Gudrun Gisladottir. 145 mins
It’s hard to imagine two more diverse directors than Woody Allen and the late Russian “poet of cinema” Andrei Tarkovsky. They do though have one thing is common - a debilitating admiration for Ingmar Bergman. For his final film (cancer would claim him soon after it was completed) Tarkovsky, who had defected from the Soviet Union, pitched up in Sweden and stocked up with Bergman touches.
There’s a Bergman setting - an isolated country house in a bleak barren marshland; a Bergman cast and crew - cinematographer Sven Nykvist and favourite actor Josephson; a Bergman story about a former actor turned professor who finds Gods and (maybe) averts Nuclear holocaust through an extreme act of faith.
The first half in particular feels oddly stage bound, with characters moving across rooms in a way no human being would naturally do unless instructed to by a theatre director. It’s very stilted; here’s one of the cinema’s most singular and unrestrained talents suddenly strangely inhibited. Though he breaks free towards the end, when the hallucinatory visual finally come they feel like inferior copies of scenes in earlier films.
And though it is not exactly the arthouse equivalent of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes video, the nuclear war theme dates it. Or rather it limits it in ways unique to a filmmaker whose other works seem almost entirely detached from contemporary concerns.
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.
Starring Erland Josephson, Susan Fleetwood, Valeire Mairesse, Allan Edwall, Gudrun Gisladottir. 145 mins
It’s hard to imagine two more diverse directors than Woody Allen and the late Russian “poet of cinema” Andrei Tarkovsky. They do though have one thing is common - a debilitating admiration for Ingmar Bergman. For his final film (cancer would claim him soon after it was completed) Tarkovsky, who had defected from the Soviet Union, pitched up in Sweden and stocked up with Bergman touches.
There’s a Bergman setting - an isolated country house in a bleak barren marshland; a Bergman cast and crew - cinematographer Sven Nykvist and favourite actor Josephson; a Bergman story about a former actor turned professor who finds Gods and (maybe) averts Nuclear holocaust through an extreme act of faith.
The first half in particular feels oddly stage bound, with characters moving across rooms in a way no human being would naturally do unless instructed to by a theatre director. It’s very stilted; here’s one of the cinema’s most singular and unrestrained talents suddenly strangely inhibited. Though he breaks free towards the end, when the hallucinatory visual finally come they feel like inferior copies of scenes in earlier films.
And though it is not exactly the arthouse equivalent of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes video, the nuclear war theme dates it. Or rather it limits it in ways unique to a filmmaker whose other works seem almost entirely detached from contemporary concerns.
