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*This blog post discusses some major plot details of Andrei Tarkovsky�s The Sacrifice*
Andrei Tarkovsky only made seven feature films, but they are surely rich enough to warrant their own blog, in which some nit-picking critic could expend all his critical energies in an exegesis of every delightful piece of Tarkovskian minutiae (there�s a blog out there, I believe called theoverlookhotel.com, devoted entirely to what it describes as �ephemera� relating to Stanley Kubrick�s The Shining, and I strongly recommend it, both as a pleasure in its own right and as an example of what such an all-Tarkovsky all-the-time sort of blog could look like).
In this post, I propose to briefly examine but one aspect of the Tarkovskian cinematic universe, and that is his penchant for levitating women, which he does in The Mirror (1975) and The Sacrifice(1986) (It�s not impossible that there might have been some levitation in Solaris as well, but it�s been several years since I last saw that movie and, if there was a levitation scene, I don�t remember it). Now, I think I understand pretty well the function of the levitation scene in The Sacrifice, so we�ll save that for last and start with The Mirror. The Mirror is not a movie that opens itself up to easy analysis. The esteemed American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum said that, on his first viewing of the film, he found it to be �completely opaque.� Now, I don�t believe I perceived it as being completely opaque, but I think the difficulty of interpreting it stems from the fact that it appears to be built up as a deeply personal (and therefore hermetic and self-referential) mythologizing of�and meditating on�Tarkovsky�s childhood. It is in this respect reminiscent of Bruno Schulz�s 1934 short story collection, The Street of Crocodiles, in which he present a series of scenes from an imagined childhood and infuses them with an almost mythological weight; this is similar in principle to the self-mythologizing that we see in so many of the novels of Kenzaburo Oe, although Oe�s novels are written with a lucidity and clarity that seems to be lacking in The Street of Crocodiles, which would seems to place Schulz more in the tradition of Tarkovsky than Oe.
Now, on to the movies in question. There is a scene in The Mirror which (I think) unfolds as follows: the protagonist�who lives in the 1970�s and is either Tarkovsky himself or a very similar alter-ego�is reminiscing about his childhood during WWII. Near the end of the film, he recollects a scene in which he and his mother visit another woman to do something (the particular version of The Mirror which I saw had the vexing habit of leaving about a quarter of the dialogue unsubtitled for some reason, so maybe that�s to blame for my uncertainty on this score). Anyway, in this house, the mother meets a woman who has a young child�two to three years old�and is pregnant with another one, and this prompts the mother to reflect on her own pregnancy, when her soldier husband was still with her (the husband appears to have abandoned the family in 1935 for reasons never revealed, although it�s possible that his military duties took him elsewhere and then he was killed in WWII). During this flashback to her pregnancy, we see an image of the mother hovering several feet off the ground, while a bird flies across the room behind her. This scene is short, and suddenly we�re back in the house again with the pregnant woman and her child.
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| Levitating woman in The Mirror. |
It�s this miracle angle with which I approach the levitation scene in The Sacrifice. The Sacrifice has a lot going on, in terms of plot (whereas The Mirror really has none to speak of), so the premise behind our levitation, in brief, is this (and I know I�ve discussed this in several previous blog posts): Friends and family of a Swedish writer (played by Erland Josephson; the film was made in Sweden as Tarkovsky had left the USSR at this point) have gathered at his house on an island much like Ingmar Bergman�s F�r�, where, to their horror, they discover that WWIII has broken out and that they are all poised on the brink of nuclear annihilation. Josephson�s writer is an avowed atheist and rationalist, but he�s willing to throw all this to the wayside if he can somehow avert catastrophe, not for his sake but for the sake of his beloved son. And so he seeks out the help of his maid, who just so happens to be an Icelandic witch and can conceivably use her power to stop the nuclear war (this works well in the movie, trust me). He goes to her in her cottage and the two begin to have sex. As their bodies entwine, the two of them levitate several feet above the bed, and rotate gently in the air.
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| The best image I could find of the airborne coupling in The Sacrifice. I seem to recall it being better lit when I watched the film. |
Much as we did with The Mirror, we ask ourselves, �Why always with the levitation, especially in what is otherwise a generally �realistic� film?� And the answer, I think, is that a miracle is occurring here (in this case, the aversion of WWIII) and the levitation is therefore a physical manifestation of that miracle.
I remember reading somewhere an anecdote about early Islam, in which some scoffer asked why Muhammad didn�t perform miracles. And this scoffer�s Muslim interlocutor responded (and I�m paraphrasing), �Dude, the man received divine dictation from an angel. Isn�t that pretty miraculous by itself?� And yes, it is, but the doubter wants to see his miracle. Miracles demand physical proof. To put it bluntly, a miracle is too important to pass by without fanfare. It must be �flashy� in some way. And that�s what these scenes of levitation amount to; they are the visible evidence of the miracle.Post-script (9/1/12):
A. I am aware that the levitating woman in The Sacrifice is Icelandic, but the title wouldn't have worked as well if I'd included that detail.
B. I think Jessica Chastain levitates briefly in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life? I don't remember, I appear to have suppressed most of my memory of that tedious, joyless, pseudo-profound, pseudo-philosophical mess of a film. Having now seen The Mirror, I think Tree of Life can best be understood as a thoroughly botched remake of Tarkovsky's superior film. If this is the case, then Malick has thoroughly misunderstood everything that makes The Mirrorwork.
If you want to do an impressionistc, "collage-style" movie, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But without a plot, each of your scenes or set-pieces has to be interesting in its own right. Now, there were scenes in The Mirror that seemed somewhat inexplicable (wherefore the documentary footage of the Cultural Revolution?) but it was at least engaging. The same cannot be said of the stupid American children and their upbringing in 1950's suburbia that make up most of TheTree of Life. Also, what's Sean Penn doing there? And those goddamned, god-awful voice-overs, which didn't even work in a better movie, like The Thin Red Line: Jim Caviezal's (don't give a fuck about spelling) character is a hick from Oklahoma; there is no context in which it is plausible for him to say things like, "Why must there be this war within nature? Why must the land contend with the sea?" Really? Why must the land contend with the sea? But at least that sounds profound, whereas Sean Penn sententiously intoning "mother" and "brother" over thrilling images of space is just pointless. The parts of The Tree of Life that worked were the parts where the humans shut the fuck up and Malick indulged his talent for "filming pretty things," to put it bluntly. Because that's what he does, and there's certainly a place for that, but let's not pretend there's any philosophical depth to it.
