Seriously people, a poem? You can't be serious. The film has merits, some lovely shots, some good mood stuff, but I found it utterly painful and pretentious... self conscious and messy. Apparently Tarkovsky stated that the artist himself does not necessarily know the meaning of an image but is compelled to express his vision. What a grandiose sense of self... guided by God, I suppose. Taking a pile of snippets of history and then blurting them out and sticking bits together with an almost invisible narrative does not make "poetry". I didn't mind the occasional sloppy filmmaking, like the sight of the tracks on the right of frame in the last shot, or the microphone shadow in one of the dull dialogue scenes, but really did mind that it was just utterly painful to watch. Perhaps I am not intelligent or deep enough to understand this poem. Or perhaps this is the most over-rated movie in history.

The mirror is a story of a dying poet experiencing a stream of consciousness. Aleksei the protagonist whose face is never revealed (since the memories shown are his true face) is recalling all the memories, dreams, thoughts, and feelings that he once encountered. The film shifts for that through three different timelines of pre- war, war, and post-war (asserting how the circumstances surrounding the person's life affect it). It is considered loosely autobiographical where the director is trying to reflect somehow on his own past pushing through its spiritual meanings, engaging in his country's history and present conditions, and depicting worldwide moments that concern all humanity. And with a brilliant touch the poems incorporated with several scenes are in fact written and read by the director's father Arseny Tarkovsky (It is important to note here that his second wife as well as his real mother appear in the movie).The highly unconventional film follows a nonlinear narrative.. and the dream-like sequence is often interrupted with archival footage that contributes to making the film a universal experience. Tarkovsky does not believe in using symbols, but every image of his carries one or several deep meanings. What about his perspectives then.. after all it is autobiographical. What is he trying to say? It seems that Tarkovsky is trying to show that everything is a reflection of another and that in every truth you'll find a mirror for the other. You'll find the mirror in the past and in the present.. in the spilled milk, in the open fields, the wind and fire, in the hardships and suffer, in war.. in the small moments of human sympathy, in the disembodied families, tragedies and lost love of a woman or mother... The director clearly uses elements from his own childhood.Tarkovsky believes in using images that provoke feelings more than thoughts and expects from his audience to perceive them from their own stance contributing by that to his work. And before going through some of the scenes, I would like to say that the camera work Tarkovsky employed is highly appreciated by critics.. the moving camera shots were fascinating and contributed thoroughly in the dream-like pace that defeats time.. mentioning also the slow motion and long shots.. the montage.. the switch from colors to black and white.. a piece of art.Interpretations to The Mirror starts with the opening scene.. the boy with the stutter may be a metaphor of how hard it is to communicate one's feelings (others said that it meant Tarkovsky has found his voice - maybe Tarkovsky meant both). The spilled milk appears in different parts of the movie as well as it does in other Tarkovsky's movies such as Stalker.. and it is accompanied here with the disembodied family. After several scenes, a thrilling shot of the husband washing Maria's hair is displayed (they need to take a different approach?).. at the end of the scene Maria views her physical appearance as an old lady facing her (the past haunts us - a reflection). Aleksei (post-war) talks to his mother on the phone and they always argue. Aleksei also quarrels with his wife Natalya and the same actress depicts both mother and wife (did Aleksei choose a woman similar to his mother to compensate "the missing love" or just as his wife stated that meant he is incapable of having a normal relationship with anyone"?"). Engaging in his country's issues, the pre-war "printing incident" scene implies that the state is suppressing.. Another scene shows an archival footage of soviet soldiers accompanied by poems about immortality and that everything in life is in a way everlasting (the spiritual journey appears in all of Tarkovsky's films). The archival footage also shows the Chinese - Russian conflict. Events that are "more universal" are also shown.. the Kurdish balloon journey, Spanish civil war (Insights, invention, and human sympathy), and the atomic tests of the year 1946. War and sympathy for its victims appear also in the scene of the Asafiev; the orphan who lost both his parents. After the shooting scene, the boy goes up to a snowy hill (implying how deep the suffering is) and a black bird stands on his head and Asafiev captures him (maybe a metaphor for the human potentials that were obstructed by war and tragedies). A blonde girl appears through several scenes and in one time with an injured lip (lost love).Leonardo Da Vinci's book is revealed in the hands of Aleksei and his son Ignat (also the same actor depicts both characters). The book makes time irrelevant and mixes the past with the present.. everything seems interrelated and reflects one another. A leaf (sadness, decay) appears in the book (representing art - decline of humanity due to war?). Ignat reads Pushkin's letter to a character that seems to resemble Anna Akhmatova (it is implied then that the character's presence was imagined - though the same character appears at the end sitting on the bed of the dying poet).Near the end, young Aleksei goes with his mother to the rich woman's house to sell her earrings.. Maria feels sickened (from the aristocratic presence?). The rich woman pushes her to "slaughter" a chicken for dinner and from there the film goes into the "levitation scene" where Maria's body rises up and a dove flies above her (the quest for peace through all this madness? - note that in a previous scene a co-worker compares Maria to a confused character in one of Dostoevksy's stories). The scene is thrilling and intense. We see then Aleksei dying.. he releases a bird from his hands (his soul to eternity?). After that, the last scene combines the three timelines all together as if happening at once!

Seldom does poetry make strict literal sense, nor does it intend to. Rather, through a combination of careful word choice and syllabic cadence, a poet can evoke emotions and convey a message just as powerful as any traditional narrative. Andrei Tarkovsky is often referred to as a visual poet, and Mirror is a film that doesn't just exemplify this style, but sees it realized to its fullest potential. Tarkovsky's images and compositions are the words of this poem, and the manner in which these images are stitched together through the organic movements of his camera is its cadence. The narrative content of the film essentially involves a narrator reflecting over his childhood, adolescence, and adult life, particularly focusing on his complex relationships with his mother, wife, and son. Instead of telling a linear story, Tarkovsky seamlessly blends the present with the past and dreams with reality. The film continuously and unpredictably pirouettes along the narrator's timeline, highlighting key moments and slowly revealing his current state of mind and outlook on life.It would be impossible to overstate the visual prowess of this film. Tarkovsky is a true master of visual art, and there is an abundance of searing, unforgettable images in this film that will instantly burn themselves into your brain. The shot composition, lighting, and use of color is immaculate and the way the camera flows freely within the spaces on screen creates an ethereal, other-worldly quality. Given that the vast majority of the film is populated by memories of the narrator, this style works extremely well. The camera seems to act as the mind's eye of the narrator as he journeys through his recollections. At times it hovers over his mother, wife or son, at others it slowly turns away and lingers on the environment as the characters speak off-screen. We as the audience feel like we are directly inside his mind, exploring these memories with him.And despite the lack of strict narrative structure, plenty of messages and themes bubble to the surface as the film progresses. Having only seen the film once at the time of writing this review, I'm definitely at a disadvantage as this is the kind of movie that needs to be seen many times to fully absorb its story and themes. From what I was able to gather on the first journey through, a big theme of the film is the cyclical nature of life and the ways in which past experiences and traumas impact the present. In an interesting and decidedly brilliant casting decision, Tarkovsky uses the same actors to play multiple key parts in the film. The same young boy plays both the narrator as a child in his distant memories, and his son in his more recent adult memories. He also uses the same actress to play his mother in his childhood memories, and his wife in his adult memories. This choice emphasizes the similarities between these characters despite their separation in time. There's a great narrated monologue about midway through the film in which the narrator (and Tarkovsky) muse over the "immortality" of life: "Everything's immortal... One table serves both granddad and grandchild... The future is being made right now." These words conjure an image of a continuous thread of life that permeates beyond the individual and through the generations. And further, as I mentioned previously, Tarkovsky seems to suggest these generations are also cyclical in nature, with individuals that mirror and reflect one another as the title of the film implies. As a boy, our narrator struggles in the absence of his father who is fighting in WW II. He lives with his mother, grandmother, and sister in a remote wooden cottage after fleeing Moscow which had been bombed. Our narrator's mother is not much comfort to him and seems detached, even unhinged as much of the imagery suggests. A telling scene shows the division between mother and son, as the narrator attempts to unsuccessfully open a door and walks away, only to have the door swing open for us to reveal his mother behind it.In the later memories, these themes recur. The settings have changed, but the characters (and again, the actors themselves) have remained the same. The narrator's son is also isolated and estranged from his distant and troubled mother. The narrator himself seems to fill the role of absent father like his father before, trying to push the boy to live with his mother or suggesting that they enroll him in a military academy. It's interesting as well that the narrator chose to marry a woman so similar to his own mother, as if he is still trying to become close to her even in adulthood. The implication seems to be that the experiences (positive and negative) of the narrator in his childhood have impacted and shaped his adult life, as they do with us all. The film, then, is essentially the narrator's visualized realization of this as he journeys through his memories. Mirror is a deeply philosophical and visually stunning work that challenges and rewards the engaged viewer. If you love movies, don't miss this one.

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.