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Mother and Son is one of those films that provides a genuine challenge to anyone trying to clearly define exactly what it is that makes it so damned special. As a reviewer you get used to dealing in the traditional elements of narrative cinema, things like pace, story, humour, dialogue, action and tension. But consider the following plot summary:
A loving and dutiful son comforts his dying mother in her final days.
And that’s it.Read More »
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The bridge film between his (Sokurov’s) first decade’s essays into historicized metafilm and the subsequent, fame-making fata morganas is Days of the Eclipse(1988), a patience-testing post-apocalyptic dawdle (based on a novel by the Strugatsky brothers) that plays more like aimless third-world doc than science fiction. Concerning a young doctor stuck in the middle of a rocky wasteland (actually, Turkmenistan, though it could easily pass for any post-colonial hunk of Africa), Daysis maddeningly oblique, visually erratic, and utterly disconnective. Angels, earthquakes, talking corpses, Stalinist iconography, and visual disjunctions may figure in, but for the most part Sokurov designed the film as an elusive tissue of non-happenings and mysterious nexuses, all of it sucking the dusty air of Soviet-satellite poverty.Read More »