(OFFRET)
**** (out of ****)
Starring Erland Josephson, Susan Fleetwood, Allan Edwall, Guorun Gisladottir, Sven Wollter, Valerie Mairesse, Filippa Franzen, and Tommy Kjellvist
Directed & written by Andrei Tarkovsky
1986
143 min PG
The appeal of a Tarkovsky film is the act of watching it. An adventure will exhilarate you and get your heart beating. But the goal of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (“Andrei Roublev,” “My Name is Ivan”) is the opposite: he slows down your heart, lowers your metabolism, and turns your brain into pudding. A Tarkovsky film is its own environment, its own world. It soaks you up and, if you let it, causes you to lose yourself in its strange world while sitting in the dark. He slows us down into a dream state, a reverie, and brings our minds to a level where his films’ ideas come at us in a manner that the words of the waking world cannot. The movies of David Lynch are like watching someone else’s dreams, but Tarkovsky makes us have the dream. When he’s doing what he does best, it doesn’t even occur to us to analyze what we’re absorbing until after the film is complete.
The act of watching “The Sacrifice” is mystical, like being in a giant, old, and silent church, like being lifted from this world through the repetition of a chant, or through intense, wordless prayer. Tarkovksy’s career-long intent was impossibly arrogant, and yet the most noble of all filmmakers: to use art to bring us closer to an otherworldly experience. The man’s ego was famously and freakishly fantastic, but it had to be if his life’s work was to prove that film is not a distraction but an artform whose primary duty should be in conveying the spiritual awe of the artist to the viewer. I could compare “The Sacrifice” and many of Tarkovsky’s drawn-out, hypnotic works to new age music, but the spiritual connotation is an inaccurate description for films immersed in Russian Orthodox imagery.
I have no idea if “The Sacrifice” works on home video. I watched a mildly battered print at a revival in museum theater filled with hushed, well-behaved moviegoers, in a good seat with clean floors and no distractions. The movie is smooth camera work, long takes, long shots, empty autumnal pastures, countrysides, faint bird noises. It’s all so sleepy and realism has no place here. We don’t even notice how gradually color drains from “The Sacrifice” and we find ourselves in a land that is not quite black-and-white, but the bronze-grey of a drizzly afternoon sky. Like many Tarkovsky films, conversations are an odd collection of non-sequitors and staring out windows, or long gazes into the reflections of puddles and mirrors. The act of leafing through a book of paintings includes the paintings’ thematic connection to the movie, but also the beauty of the images themselves, the joy of turning thick, heavy pages, of hearing the crackle of paper. Does the turning of pages advance the “story?” We’re too slowed down to care; now that we’ve adopted the viewpoint of God or the angels some hidden beauty is dawning on us that we’re usually moving too quickly to notice. Like a wanderer from the next world, we see everything in the country house in the vaguest possible way…is that woman the old man’s daughter? His second wife? His daughter-in-law? Is the doctor his son, his ex-wife’s new husband, or just her lover? Are the old man and his wife even divorced, or have they just been living apart? We don’t know, but we don’t know to care until after the movie is finished.
Very loosely, “The Sacrifice” is the old man’s (Erland Josephson) birthday. In the open spaces of his fjord-side house in Scandinavia and the surrounding countryside, he is joined by his maid (Valerie Mairesse), his very young son (Tommy Kjellvist), his estranged wife (Susan Fleetwood), and a lonely local woman (Filippa Franzen) rumored to be a witch. Also present are the doctor (Sven Wollter), who may be his son or his wife’s replacement for him, and the quiet and attractive young woman (Guoron Gisladottir) who is either his daughter or daughter-in-law. Theirs is not a healthy family, but they are as far from Tennessee Williams as the fjords are from Tennessee. There are no arguments, no fights, no scenes. Only awkward pauses, long looks away from each other, and the resignation of insoluble problems and wounds that will at best scab, but never heal.
And then, very strangely, civilization collapses. In the flickering light of an unseen dining room television set, a despondent announcer describes, in the strangest terms, how the bombs are dropping, the end is near, and martial law will soon be in effect. Here, in the coastal desolation, there is nothing that can be done except to panic, resign oneself, or say farewell to the land. Nothing to do, except the mysterious realization made by the old man and his favorite neighbor (Allan Edwall): an exchange can be made, and the world can be saved. The neighbor, who looks like Tarkovsky himself, is the art movie’s form of self-parody: a man who speaks in constantly wistful tones of intellectual and philosophical things, even while the old man’s small son ties his shoelaces together. What this exchange is, or the exact nature of it, cannot be explained in rational terms, and must be left to the world of “The Sacrifice” to make sense. Or at least kind-of make sense.
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Much has been written on “The Sacrifice” and a myriad of interpretations has been made. The son of his old age, the bargain with the witch, the old man’s first prayers in a long time, his retiree’s fascination with the Orient—what does it mean? Does his sacrifice make him Christ, or does his eventual divorce from the world for its sake make him the Father? Sometimes I favor the experience itself rather than an interpretation of it; I prefer the act of dreaming rather than asking a psychiatrist what it means.
Tarkovsky has been dead now lo these dozen years, but much of his legacy lives on in his protégé Alexander Sokurov, who perhaps out-Tarkovsky’d Tarkovsky with last year’s “Russian Ark,” a brain-melting filmed dream of epic proportions and absentee narrative. There is not a widespread appeal for the likes of Tarkovsky and Sokurov, and many who see their films will find themselves untouched and impervious or unwilling to succomb to their magic. Most ticket-paying moviegoers are adverse to being slowed down and have an infuriatingly slavish devotion to “the plot and nothing but the plot.” So-called “intelligent” people belong to a binary culture, in which all things either are or aren’t. A lot of religion in America has tried to become purely an explainable thing: intellectual, literary, free of mysticism. This trend has led to religious assemblies wanting to feel more like pep rallies, English classes, or rock concerts. Tarkovsky films feel more like church than many churches do.
But most everybody will happily listen to music that is vague, tells no particular story, and is more about communicating a singer’s emotions and mood or creating a certain atmosphere. Those same people are often pitiless toward films that try to do the same, although the last time I checked the 60+ minutes of Beethoven’s Fifth still doesn’t have a “story.” Many moviemakers are able to transport us to another time and another place, but few have Tarkovsky’s nearly-musical ability to take us to a different level of consciousness, that place of art reaching for the divine. What does “The Sacrifice” mean? Well, if I could bring the mystical experience back into the world, then it wouldn’t be a mystical experience now, would it?
Finished March 10, 2004
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