I'm not sure if I was supposed to, but I found Tarkovsky's last film funny. Oh, for sure it's his usual, long, hypnotic, incredible and utterly immersive style, but certain moments - like the postman suddenly falling down unconscious - laugh-out-loud funny. In fact the whole story.
But I leap ahead of myself, like a man in a Resnais film. One of the things I love about this is - without wishing to sound pretentious - the mise en scene - the way he has these beautiful long takes in which people move around in front of the camera - it's almost a textbook description of that phrase, particularly when the action moves inside.
Inside? I keep leaping ahead, like a frog. A man talks to his son, who's had an operation of his throat and is silent, and they plant a Japanese tree, and the father says if you do something the same every day then surely something will change, and a friendly postman turns up on a bike. The man, Alexander, played by Erland Josephson, known for his Ingmar Bergman appearances, but also from Tarkovsky's Nostalghia, is like many a Tarkovsky hero a talker and a thinker. It's his birthday and his family and the postman attend a birthday party at the house, a solitary house in the country.
(By the way, this has happened in about two brilliant long takes, the camera moving very, very subtly, like it does throughout the film. I'm sure it would help people of a nervous disposition.)
But then - a terrible catastrophe is announced - it looks like the end is nigh for them all, as the TV and the power goes. People say '"We could head north, but who's to say things aren't worse there?" and Alexander's mother-in-law (Susan Fleetwood) has one of those Tarkovsky breakdowns requiring her husband to sedate her. (He then sedates Alexander's wife, Filippa Franzen, even though she doesn't need sedating.)
While all this is going on we have the very brilliant Sven Nykvist - I know, Bergman's cameraman, right? Oh yeah, the film's set in Sweden. Did Tarkovsky like Bergman? I forget. Anyway. Nykvist is capturing the light beautifully. There's a scene of the boy asleep in bed and the wind is blowing the curtain in and out and it changes the light in the room - I love scenes like that and could watch them for minutes - which is one of the reasons I love Tarkovsky. But what else Nykvist is doing so brilliantly is catching the dying light as the day moves on (the film's mainly in real time).
Let's identify Allan Edwall as the suddenly falling postman, who tells Alexander that the only way he can save them all is to visit their maid Maria - Guorun Gisladottir - a very pan-European cast - and "lie with her" - as she is a witch with special powers that will save them all. The rest of the family are arguing - Sven Wollter declares he is moving to work in Australia, the maid Valerie Mairesse keeps out of things - so Alexander sets out on a bicycle, and amusingly falls off it at one point, tells Maria about how he fucked up his mother's garden (look, this sounds crazy, but you have to be there) and then he does lie with her, and they literally spin up off the bed in one of those Mirror moments that Tarkovsky catches you off guard with.
SPOILERS ahead as I need to reveal the end of the film, in the right order, for once. Alexander wakes up and there is electricity and the world isn't going to end and we start to realise the hints of him being 'unwell' are actually saying he's gone crazy before. He sets alight to his house, and the ambulance arrives to take him away (this is all in one shot as the house literally burns down in front of our eyes) and I swear the scene of the ambulance drivers running around trying to capture Alexander, and the way that they put him into the ambulance and he keeps getting out is like The Keystone Cops. And the remaining family watch the house burn down and the ground is all water-logged like those familiar with Tarkovsky will recognise - characters standing or sitting or lying in water - why is water so important to Tarkovsky?
And then - the boy, under the Japanese tree - and he speaks - and says ' "In the beginning was the word." Why's that, Papa?' - and the camera tracks up the tree to the branches in the sunset, and at that precise moment Q phoned me from upstairs and said something about her parents, I can't remember what even though it was only yesterday, because, once again, I am blown away by Tarkovsky. It was his last film, and I think he knew it. And I'd watch it again already.
It won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and the BAFTA for Best Foreign Film.
I think by the way - and in line with his other films - that the English title should simply be Sacrifice.
Some critics - like Geoff Dyer - claim that Tarkovsky's later films became repetitive - I couldn't disagree more. I think some of the ideas and sequences and moments in this and his second last film Nostalghia are quite different to any found in his earlier films.
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