Mirror (2014)

Excellent but underrated film

Absolutely Brilliant!

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

The Mirror is a film that touched me in a way no other film has. The cinematography and overall atmosphere draws indescribable emotion from me and takes my away. I can write an essay attempting to explain why it's a masterpiece and how it's an example of how movies don't have to be books with images to be great but words are just words and I'll fail to explain the emotions this movie makes feel. Just watch it and maybe you'll feel similar or maybe not, it's not for everybody. But for me it's everything I want in a film and more.

always, each film of Tarkovsky , for me, is a church. in few cases, a cathedral. and this gives to him the advantage to be more than a remarkable director or a wise teller. "The Mirror" is a brilliant example. fragments of life. in not precise order. absence of story. each scene - a picture from a lost place. mixture of lives. and suggestion. and, in a moment, the feeling to be fragments from your life. all is beautiful and bitter and strange and familiar. because it is the story of a century. and its confession. because it is just a basket with memories. defining purposes and needs and expectations and words. because all is touching. and far. because, long time after its end, I preserved from it only the image of the mother of Tarkovski. as the mother. because it is a walk on the water. using as steps the presence of Arseny Tarkovsky and his poetry. the image of Oleg Yankovsky. and the look of the boy in the mirror. a film for who the descriptions/ definitions do not works. so, see it. for a form of view with yourself.

A little boy turns on a television, and watches the flickering static lines. A psychiatrist uses hypnosis and laying on of hands to treat a bigger boy with a speech impediment, while the shadow of the filmmakers' boom microphone is clearly seen on the wall. A voice-over by a man explains where you should get off the road towards their house. A man does get off the road and initiates a conversation with a woman who is not the woman the little boy watches washing her hair. The ceiling comes crashing down. Another house (?) burns to the ground in the pouring rain. Later, newsreel footage follows. Bombs fall on Spain and a rooster is slaughtered. And so it goes, on an on.It's artsy and all, and with a little imagination you can figure out what the 'mirror' in the title refers to. A man, who lost his father early and had all sorts of problems both with his mother and his wife, reflects on his troubled past, putting together his fragmented memories (the shards of a broken mirror) in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way. Or, possibly, the man is a symbol for Soviet Russia itself, though I wouldn't go that far. The problem is that there is no story you could follow, no characters you could identify with, no well-defined spatial or temporal frame of reference for the tediously drawn-out, obscure and disjointed scenes, and due to this lack of basic accessibility there is no message to take home.Mirror is a respectable attempt at a unique form of filmmaking, but it requires such an effort on the viewer's part (with no reward whatsoever) that it is hard to imagine why anyone would not fall asleep or walk out of the theatre after a couple of minutes. If you love films like Derek Jarman's The Last of England, you should certainly give it a try, but for my part, I'll stay with Tarkovsky's Solaris or Andrei Rublev.

The Mirror is a poetry of images and motion. It's the kind of film that probably needs to be seen several times to understand, but its enjoyable even the first time thanks to the imagery and atmosphere it can create. Instead of a traditional plot, this movie speaks through symbols, again much like a poem. Rather than following any linear story, the scenes are taken from various places in time featuring a handful of characters, and other scenes taken from documentaries spliced in between.One of the most interesting elements is the camera. It moves like a ghost throughout the movie- gently gliding across extended single shot scenes, and sliding across characters and their reflections. Interestingly it maintains this effect when its shown from the first person, and other characters are addressing the character whose point of view were looking from. This is why I said the camera is like a ghost, because most of the movie is filmed like this it's as if this character behind the camera is always there, which is even made possible because the camera is capable of walking across dream-like sequences as readily as real ones.One of the earliest scenes in the movie is of this time, and summarizes why this movie is so engrossing. After the scene of a house burning down in the rain, there is one of a woman washing her hair, which is ordinary on the surface but a very eerie atmosphere is created because of her very slow movements and the hair covering her face. The tension is brought up dramatically from the surroundings: walls scarred by flames but dripping with moisture. A connection is made to the burned down house from earlier, and later scenes in the movie take place in buildings with similar walls. Links such as these between disparate scenes of the movie create this impression of a poem, where all these separate elements where put in place to create a single meaning, but what that is is largely up to the audience to discover.There are many more examples throughout, but that is just a glimpse of the atmosphere that makes this movie so interesting to watch even the first time.