The Sacrifice (1986) A Film by Andrei Tarkovsky

"In Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, the distance from hope to despair is a short jump—a chasm crossed with the help of something so immediate as a television transmission. As his birthday celebration winds down on a gloomy summer evening in remote Sweden, retired intellectual Alexander (Erland Josephson) tiptoes half-drunk into his living room to find a small company of friends and family bewitched by the soft blue glow of a TV set’s screen, out of which emanates an announcement of nuclear conflict. The warning winds down, the TV is turned off, and the mood descends—first into stunned silence, then into outright hysteria, and then into a kind of sedated anxiousness from which the film never quite resurfaces. In certain contexts, this dramaturgical pivot might register a bit maudlin, but in 2018, when Twitter and cable news provide an endless gushing stream of outrages, the film’s evocation of being rapidly thrown into disarray by a piece of topical turmoil hits home."

Kino released a new Blu-ray for The Sacrifice, so I reviewed it for Slant.

Hard to Be a God (2013) A Film by Aleksei German

"'God, if you exist, stop me.' This is one of the half-conscious utterances made by Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik) in the latter half of Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God as he contemplates a killing spree on the morally bankrupt planet of Arkanar. As a scientist originally sent from Earth to neutrally investigate the planet's Dark Ages because its crazed inhabitants have been snuffing out their few remaining intellectuals, he's been strictly advised against any kind of physical intervention, but that matters little at this point; nothing short of a divine occurrence could halt or delay his inexorable descent into madness. What's most haunting about the phrase—delivered, like all of the film's democratized dialogue, in a tremulous grumble that barely competes with the surrounding clamor of swaying chains and leaking orifices—is its sense of reflexive submission, the underlying implication being that when exposed long enough to a civilization cast off from common decency and deep in a moral void, the loss of reason and even sanity is a definite eventuality." Full review of Kino Lorber's new Blu-Ray here.

Chagall-Malevich (2014) A Film by Aleksandr Mitta

"When treated conventionally, the artist biopic can be the domain for pedantic historical shading and subservient mise-en-scène. Veteran Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Mitta's answer to that challenge is to translate his subject's style so vehemently that the compulsion to inform and historicize becomes almost a distraction from the aesthetic acrobatics. Franco-Russian painter Marc Chagall, Chagall-Malevich's principal protagonist, was a Jewish modernist who responded to the doom and gloom of his epoch with brilliantly colored, whimsically composed canvases that blended expressionist, cubist, and abstract sensibilities. In attempting to simulate Chagall's work, Mitta whips up his own quirky jumble of techniques: conspicuously crude digital compositing, perpetual Dutch angles, sporadic animated flourishes, drastic chromatic swings, and a liberally applied cerulean vignette that surrounds the center of interest and lends those on the margins of the frame a ghastly aquarium-tank pallor." More at Slant Magazine.

Cannes 2012 Round-Up

Below is a complete ranking of the films I saw at the 65th Cannes Film Festival. Enjoy!

1. Holy Motors (Carax, France, In Competition)

When I saw Leos Carax's first feature in thirteen years, Holy Motors, on the final day of rescreenings, it was by no small margin the most mysteriously beautiful, inventive film I'd seen at Cannes. Starting with the simple setup of a man working as a professional chameleon, riding a limousine stuffed to the brim with suitcases full of disguises around a serenely dreamy Paris and fulfilling different "appointments" around the city, Carax builds a multilayered meditation on performance, identity, virtual reality, and cinematic artifice. Much of the film's power comes from Denis Lavant, most deserving of the festival's "Best Actor" award, who lives each episode of the film's chronological but strangely timeless structure with the candidness and thoroughness necessary to breathe life into the film's motif of dual identities and the elusive "self". What at first seems to smell of redundancy and half-assed improvisation proves to be executed with such remarkable subtlety, grace, and precision by Carax that not a single delirious chapter - even as the director pushes Lavant to vaudevillian feats such as playing a repugnant sewer-dweller carrying an angelic Eva Mendes into his shit-stained lair, concluding with a sight-gag of Lavant's erection - feels out of place. This is a film with a fearless sense of movement and visual invention, not to mention a constant self-awareness and absurdist humor. I can't wait to see it again.

2. Journal De France (Depardon and Nougaret, France, Out of Competition/Special Screenings)

A basement full of unreleased newsreel celluloid from legendary French documentarian Raymond Depardon covering a vast range of small and large scale historical events circa the middle of the 20th century yielded the festival's most moving and poetic images. Uncovered by Depardon's wife and usual sound recordist Claudine Nougaret and positioned alongside contemporary footage of Depardon taking a photographic tour of France alone in his car, the resulting cut of Journal De France becomes a mesmerizing essay (set to killer musical cues!) on photographic truth and how images become a mirror of one's thoughts and feelings throughout the course of one's life. Yet as much as the film is a loving portrait of Depardon the artist and man, it's also, as the title suggests, a kaleidoscopic journey through France's history, its social and cultural charms, its regrettable involvement in wars, its strange political missteps (the scene of finance minister Giscard D’Estaing describing his public marketing campaign is a particular gem), and most of all, its ordinary civilians. The film's eye, like that of its primary subject, is humble, compassionate, and patient.

3. In Another Country (Hong, South Korea, In Competition)

The first time Hong Sang-soo's static camera compulsively snap-zoomed in on the action in In Another Country's extended opening shot, it's as if the entire audience experienced a collective lurch towards the actors. Perhaps this impression is just to due to my unfamiliarity with Hong's aesthetic, but in any case In Another Country provides a heightened intimacy with the filmed material, a direct relationship between director/audience and subject, and a sense of the film being conceived as it's being shot. A work so casual, spontaneous, and grounded rarely makes an appearance In Competition at Cannes, and Hong's glorious hangout of a film is all the more powerful for it. One of several films at the festival (along with Cosmopolis, Like Someone in Love, Morning of Saint Anthony's Day, In the Fog, and Moonrise Kingdom) that seemed to exist in a deserted bubble of a world comprised only of characters in the story, Hong follows Isabelle Huppert as she materializes the incomplete scenario ideas of an aspiring screenwriter (seen in the opening shot) on vacation in a South Korean beach town. The film's effortless narrative symmetry allows one to contemplate the subtle variations in the ways Huppert's three different characters are treated by a rotating cast of locals, thus providing insights into love, life, and otherness so off-the-cuff and fluid it puts shame to more heavy-handed treatments of these motifs.

4. Post Tenebras Lux (Reygadas, Mexico, In Competition)

The obligatory pillar of provocation this year was held up by Carlos Reygadas with his new film Post Tenebras Lux, an ambitious collage-like expression of Mexican country life that unsurprisingly garnered equal parts applause and booing. (One wonders when Cannes crowds will grow up and learn to embrace artistic license and individualistic work without resorting to knee-jerk skepticism.) Post Tenebras Lux digresses rather significantly from the comparatively sobering and linear Silent Light, but what it does share with Reygadas' previous work is its insistence upon making its audience feel something, and it put me in an unusually discomfiting space that I've rarely experienced from cinema. Despite some of its age-old arthouse ingredients (nature, animals, mechanical sex, an unforgivably extraneous scene of animal cruelty), the film is quite unlike anything ever made, and truly unique to Reygadas' sensibilities. A dark energy pulses through the film as the Mexican filmmaker never shies away from presenting conflicting emotions (family bliss and marital tension, tenderness and unexplained violence, religious devotion and paralyzing fear of the Devil) alongside each other with fervent unpredictability, giving its mystical and quasi-autobiographical musings a distinctly different tone than the otherwise structurally similar Tree of Life from last year. Though Reygadas employed the suddenly in vogue but previously extinct Academy aspect ratio (the boxy, claustrophobic 4:3), no film at Cannes felt bigger or more expansive, as its loud, immersive sound design and ghostly visuals exploded from the screen.

5. Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami, Iran/Japan/France, In Competition)

I'll join the chorus of critics intrigued but somewhat baffled by Abbas Kiarostami's new Tokyo-set feature Like Someone in Love. The film is startlingly open-ended, seeming to merely capture a few episodes in the middle of a much longer narrative, and in the thick of Cannes craziness, the mental space required to mine Kiarostami's complexity is simply non-existent. Here, the director charts a similar paradigm shift roughly at the midway point as that of Certified Copy when the relationship between a young girl (Rin Takanashi) and an old man (Tadashi Okuno) shifts from prostitute/client to grandfather/granddaughter based on the innocuous misunderstanding of the girl's psychologically abusive boyfriend (Ryo Kase). The side-effect is an opaque investigation into the nature of social roles and perception, limited to a few interiors in Tokyo and several of the director's trademark car conversations. It's amazing how economical this film is, using such a small number of tense, protracted dialogue scenes to open up a vast ocean of mystery around these three characters, each of whom appear to be hiding something authentic and unfettered beneath their social façades.

6. Walker (Tsai, Taiwan/Japan, Critic's Week) A new 30-minute short by Tsai Ming-Liang entitled Walker was one of the best surprises of the festival. I'm still eagerly awaiting a new feature from the Taiwanese master, but this new work is precisely the length it needs to be. The film is decidedly, unapologetically simple, though certainly not simplistic. In it, a Buddhist monk (Tsai apostle Lee Kang-Sheng) dressed in a bright red robe walks through the hustle-bustle of Tokyo at a snail's pace to fetch a snack (this narrative detail is only revealed later in the film in an unexpected sight gag), his head perpetually facing the ground and his eyes in a meditative squint. He lifts each foot as if lifting the weight of his spirit before returning it to the ground with patience and grace. Were it not for the real-time passersby - many of whom take note of the camera's presence (adding gravitas to the performative spectacle) - one might be tempted to assume Tsai shot at a high frame-rate for slow motion. Lee's persevering slowness, his utter commitment to the act, is astonishing. Tsai shot the film himself on a digital camera with his usual frozen takes and distinctive urban framing, and the result is a remarkably pure evocation of the ghettoized pursuit of faith in the modern consumerist environment.

7. In the Fog (Loznitsa, Russia, In Competition) An extreme seriousness towards death characterizes a great deal of the best Russian cinema, and Sergei Loznitsa's In the Fog joins that lineage. This 2-hour opus unwaveringly explores the rocky psychological landscape of men crawling inevitably towards a not-too-distant death, meanwhile caught between the absurd pressures of patriotism and a simple respect for human existence. On the frontiers of the German occupation, Sushenya (Vladimir Svirskiy) is wrongly accused of treason by his fellow men, and escorted out of his forest home by two Russian soldiers - Burov (Vladislav Abashin) and Voitik (Sergei Kolesov) - to be killed. Happenstance has it that Nazi soldiers interrupt the scene of the punishment, and Burov becomes the wounded, setting the stage for an extended inquiry into the ethical dilemmas of war under a misguided regime. Loznitsa's dialogue-heavy script - set entirely within the confines of the grey and foreboding woods - often stumbles and crawls, and, in its lack of variety, clearly shows the effects of working with limited funds (this is a film that could have benefited greatly from a more palpable sense of surrounding context), but In the Fog is nonetheless the most stirringly spiritual feature of the festival.

8. Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day (Rodrigues, Portugal, Critic's Week) There's not a single horizon line visible in João Pedro Rodrigues' 30-minute short Morning of Saint Anthony's Day, and it creates a powerfully destabilizing effect. Paired in a Critic's Week program with Walker, the films share a quiet observation of people walking through an urban space, but here there is an enigmatic undertone - teased out directly late in the film when one girl's Twilight Zone-esque ringtone sounds - of science-fiction and campy genre cinema that allows the images of a swarm of young adults emerging to level ground from within subway stations to suggest a kind of post-apocalyptic zombie invasion. Rodrigues covers all of the action - teenagers throwing up, keeling over inexplicably, walking into city ponds while holding up their cellphones seemingly in search of service, etc. - from vaguely aerial perspectives, bolstering the uncanny effect of the happenings. Is this a metaphor for the somnambulistic state of contemporary techno-youth, or is it just an unconventional vision of the undead traversing a posthuman landscape? The film's only press blurb is of little help: "Tradition says that on June 13th, Saint Anthony’s Day – Lisbon’s patron - lovers must offer small vases of basil with paper carnations and flags with popular quatrains as a token of their love." Morning of Saint Anthony's Day is an inspired oddity.

9. Amour (Haneke, France/Germany/Austria, In Competition)

Michael Haneke's Amour is an unapologetically traditional, by-the-numbers European arthouse film centering on the big themes of mortality, love, grief, family, and humiliation. Which is not to say it's fraudulent or insincere, just that it's precisely the unflinching film one would expect Haneke to make on the topic of an aging couple slowly coming to terms with death. Every formal strategy (detached wide shots, measured cutting, muted colors), narrative jolt (sudden violence, a metaphorical bird entering a French apartment), and casting decision (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabelle Huppert as the central family) is justified and expected, but as a Bergmanesque chamber drama it lacks the magic and complex humane treatment of Bergman. In Amour, death divides a family, and Haneke, amazingly precise as he is, can't put forth an image of postmortal hope that is very convincing, instead preferring to unceasingly pick apart the physical and psychological strain of aging and death. There's an abysmal fear in this film that's disguised as cruel realism.

10. Lawless (Hillcoat, USA, In Competition)

John Hillcoat's Lawless, previously known as The Wettest County in the World and based off the book of the same name, received some undue critical hounding after its premiere, which is strange given that it's a pretty bareknuckled and well-made Western, nothing more and nothing less. Sure, Hillcoat waters down any moral ambiguity that might have existed in the film's awkwardly schmaltzy epilogue, and the sexual landscape leans towards vaguely misogynistic, but I'll take some of these missteps over The Road's simple-minded affectations of importance and superficially "contemplative" mise-en-scène. What's more, Lawless is chock full of thrilling performances by Tom Hardy as a daftly philosophizing brute, Gary Oldman as an indifferent mobster, Guy Pearce as the slimy villain, and Shia LaBoeuf (!) in his best role as a wannabe tough guy. Still, the greatest source of my enthusiasm for the film was the immaculately dusty and contrasty cinematography of Benoît Delhomme, who shoots these Prohibition-Era ghost towns - always wafting with the smoke of whisky and brandy production - in an undeniably conventional yet painterly manner. It's a ruthlessly brutal genre movie that for quite some time maintains an air of Peckinpah-like stoicism.

11. Lawrence Anyways (Dolan, France, Un Certain Regard) Another year of inclusion in Un Certain Regard for Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan represents yet another example of the mainstream hesitance to embrace youthfulness in auteur cinema. Surely, Lawrence Anyways has more personality, and is more expressive and heartfelt, than a number of the Competition entries, and it could have added further diversity to the lineup, especially in light of its focus on social minorities (specifically a transsexual intending to remain in a heterosexual relationship). Dolan's films clearly emerge from a passionate and genuine place, and their energy and messiness is entirely the product of a spontaneous excitement for cinema. Needless to say, Lawrence Anyways is sloppy, overlong, and digressive, but the strange allure of Dolan's work is that he manages to absorb these flaws into the texture of his character's lives, discovering ways to transform self-indulgent slow-motion shots (this one has even more than Heartbeats) into gaudy expressions of a character's veiled insecurity or overblown self-importance. Like Dolan's main character, Lawrence Anyways is split between two urges: that of individuality and personal fetishism (the film's often radical compositional style and its Felliniesque eccentricities, to name two), and that of conformity (its fiery scenes of romantic turmoil featuring a revelatory Suzanne Clément and its eye-rollingly sappy denouement, both of which achieve Hollywood rom-com stature). Upon close inspection of the film's insanity, it's not too difficult to see the structural design on display.

12. The Hunt (Vinterberg, Denmark, In Competition) Thomas Vinterberg's a director with a clear interest in the secrets lurking beneath the complacent surfaces of Danish communities and families, and he's exercised that concern yet again in The Hunt, a finely wrought but quickly forgettable drama about a Kindergarten teacher (Mads Mikkelsen) who is angrily cast off from his circle of friends and colleagues following the random lie of his female student (Annika Wedderkopp). There's a palpable socioeconomic and cultural infrastructure in the film's small town, as well as a solid sense of verisimilitude that must come from Vinterberg's years as a Dogme ascetic, but at the same time there's a sluggishness, a beating-around-the-bush quality to the film's narrative progression, as if Vinterberg has merely set up a troubling scenario to relish in his formidable knack for depicting societal disintegration. Furthermore, The Hunt feels too much like just a good story that was put to film, rather than a story that was expanded upon and expressed vitally through cinematic means. It's a small distinction, but it's the one that prevents Vinterberg from being as distinctive a director as he could be.

13. Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson, USA, In Competition/Opening Night)

The Darjeeling Limited suggested a director trying to engage with issues broader than his own tiny universe and Fantastic Mr. Fox showcased an artist's desire to work with a new approach, but Moonrise Kingdom represents a firm step back into the confines of Wes Anderson's own headspace, and at this point the refusal to make artistic evolutions more drastic than the simple changing of a typeface and the move away from anamorphic widescreen is somewhat damning. The film feels decidedly small and inconsequential, failing to achieve the surprise emotional punch or sprawling canvas of films like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic. Furthermore, Anderson puts the burden of the film's momentum in the hands of two unknown child actors (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward) who just cannot carry a scene or portray pre-pubescent love in a convincing manner. As usual for Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom is aesthetically irreproachable, shot with an oppressively diorama-like sensitivity and production designed to fantastical perfection, but it puts its eggs in the wrong basket narratively, all while wasting the naturally Andersonian flair of Anderson newcomers Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, and Tilda Swinton. My love for Anderson aside, and despite a hilariously overblown climax that utilizes some throwback color toning, Moonrise Kingdom is a frustratingly flimsy act of regression from this important American filmmaker.

14. Cosmopolis (Cronenberg, USA, In Competition)

The humid theater it screened in was of no help to David Cronenberg's already-stuffy Cosmopolis, the experience of which was akin to being suffocated by the director as he whispered his esoteric contemporary philosophies in your ear. Well, more precisely, Robert Pattinson, who has become the inert mouthpiece for Cronenberg's meandering and impenetrable dialogues on the current state of economics and politics. It's clear enough that this is the story of the 1%, but I'll admit total confusion and ignorance towards the remainder of Cronenberg's intentions, and I'm certainly not prepared or interested in trying to shuffle through the needlessly coded meanings in this never-ending string of talk. Intellectual detachment is all well and good though if Cronenberg were at least able to present his ideas in compelling cinematic fashion (hence the success of Like Someone in Love) rather than resorting to what feels like characters reading manuscripts to each other in a black box theater. The outside world is so closed-off and pared-down in Cosmopolis that it's as if any of Cronenberg's decisions apart from the dialogue (the NYC location, Pattinson's plot-churning desire for a crosstown haircut, the rat as a symbol of the deteriorating dollar) were arrived at arbitrarily. Add to this the flat digital cinematography and Cosmopolis is just a dull, unimaginative slog of a film.

15. The Paperboy (Daniels, USA, In Competition)

Ok, at least Lee Daniels dropped the wacked-out racial hierarchy of the abominable Precious, but in its wake he's yielded a frankly incompetent, meaningless, and misguided tribute to the low-budget homespun camp cinema of the film's 1960's era, and he's traded the revolting view of inner-city blacks in the previous film for stereotypes of southern white trash in this one. Surely, The Paperboy aims for ickiness, but to what end? In a climactic sex scene between recently-released criminal Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack) and blonde bombshell Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), Daniels cuts to images of livestock as a punctuation mark, as if deriding his characters' baseless behavior. As much as the film tries to approach a sympathetic note for its depraved characters in the end, for the most part it rides this reprehensive wave throughout, and it presents it all in a psychosexual storm of bad editing and crummy lighting. Zac Efron stumbles away with some surprisingly nuanced acting as a detective's (Matthew McConaughey) younger brother and a man struggling with overwhelming physical desire for an Kidman's older character, but otherwise the cast appears confused, seemingly lost in Daniels' inexact mise-en-scène, unaware of whether or not the cameras are rolling. This is a profoundly awful film.

Silent Souls (2010) A Film by Aleksei Fedorchenko

In its opening sequence of lovely, elegiac imagery and reflective voice-over, Aleksei Fedorchenko's Silent Souls succinctly evokes its central motifs: the decay of tradition, the tenacity of memory, and the way that the flow of time washes away human rituals and pastimes. For the next 70 or so minutes, the film continues to use the same means in an attempt to reach the same end. Instead of strengthening and deepening the themes however, this method only renders Fedorchenko's purpose remote and tiring as his tools become increasingly apparent and his imagination wears increasingly thin. The loose, amorphous story concerns two men played by Yuriy Tsurilo and Igor Sergeev (names here are negligible, but for the sake of organization, they are called Miron and Aist, respectively) who traverse the breathtaking vistas of West-Central Russia to usher the former's recently deceased wife Tanya (Yuliya Aug) into the void on the shore of the allegedly sacred Lake Nero in an ancient ritual of Merja culture. The ins-and-outs of this spiritual process are laboriously laid out by Aist in characteristically heavy Euro-narration, and indeed it seems as if this descriptive and mournful text was the film's entire raison d'être. An intensely introspective road movie is built in here rather cryptically, but one gets the sense that it's ultimately incidental, that Fedorchenko could have offered up any anecdotal narrative in this cold, gray Russian milieu to flesh out his character's musings.

Aist's narration informs the audience that the Merjan people were an ancient tribe from Lake Nero, that they considered water to be the essential link between life and death, that they assimilated into Russian culture in the 17th century, that they treated Lake Nero as the axis of their spiritual endeavors, and that few of their descendants remain, among other particularities. Fedorchenko's images, on the other hand, inform the audience that this flat, deserted region of Russia is at once imposing and impossibly gorgeous, and that these men spend the vast majority of their days driving around this featureless landscape without speaking. Of course, I'm being somewhat facetious, but maybe not so much. The lasting impression of Silent Souls is its droning attention to the backs of Miron and Aist's heads as the environment passes by them. A fitting metaphor for the irreversible passage of time, yes, but also one that is pillaged so insistently and opportunistically as a structural element that it threatens to sabotage any understatement that might have existed in the shot itself. Half of the film feels vacated by these images, and instead of building to the walloping cumulative effect of transience that Fedorchenko clearly intends, the repetition adds a level of visual monotony to what is otherwise a carefully composed and formidably lit film.

Given all the lascivious shots of the vaginal region, pubic hair, and women either in sexual ecstasy or total numbness, it becomes tempting to label the film curiously sexist and perhaps vaguely misogynist. But then one realizes that Fedorchenko is not merely treating women as objects, but men too. And then, one realizes that any actual object in the mise-en-scene is also treated as a terminally unsymbolic, definitively plain object. Whereas filmmakers like Lisandro Alonso and Tsai Ming-Liang manage to find the weight and modest beauty in the simple fact of the physical world, Fedorchenko's Earth, as well as its human and inhuman inhabitants, feels dull and lifeless. I suspect this is largely because of the disconnect between the director's ideas and his execution. This is a film about the wonder and philosophical faith assigned to concrete things (people, traditions, clothing, objects (there's that word again!)) - that is, the unique ability for people to find meaning beyond surfaces - in which very little is anything more than a compositional element, and in which a dry, self-conscious, by-the-numbers "slow cinema" aesthetic suppresses any charm from the environments that are filmed. For a film so concerned with preserving tradition, nothing seems convincingly sacred.



A glaring case in point: Fedorchenko wears his Tarkovsky influence on his sleeve in many ways, the most salient being his interest in water and its metaphysical properties, yet the film's imagery rarely makes compelling use of liquid. This has to be the most parched film about water ever made. There are a few overhead shots of flowing water from rivers and lakes, but after its usage in the opening montage, it starts to feel pro forma, like a pre-coded symbol rather than a living, breathing image. In fact, in a single scene, fire makes a more visceral impact as it blazes by the shore of Lake Nero, taking the spirit of Tanya with it. Even then, the massive flame seems as much a ransacking of one of Tarkovsky's quintessential compositional elements as it is a tribute to the ancient Merjan custom of burning deceased loved ones and tossing their ashes in the lake. To complete the wholehearted love for the Russian master, Fedorchenko rips the haunting segment from The Mirror of Margarita Terekhova drenching her hair in water with a flashback scene of Miron sensually bathing his wife in Vodka.

Silent Souls isn't all fraudulence though; it operates under a distinctly Russian spell of melancholy and nostalgia, and this mood feels organically sewn into the patchwork of the film. Indeed, the best scene is a montage that visualizes Aist's recollections of his childhood and his father in which the two of them row canoes and walk on ice against painterly backdrops, likely because it actually engages with the reverence of the past that runs through Aist's narration. Otherwise, Fedorchenko's just wallowing in the present tense that he clearly finds corrupt and soulless, hence a brief scene of meaningless sex that the two men have with anonymous urban hookers, followed by an overwrought shot of their blurred figures in a hotel window in front of evil city lights. If Fedorochenko had brought the same complexity of thought to the distinction between past and present that he brings to the topic of life and death, Silent Souls may have developed a justification for its strange assault of visual punctuation marks loosely dancing around the narrative being relayed by Aist on the soundtrack. It's not that there's a significant chasm between sound and image; it's that Aist's words are so open-ended that only vague visuals can accompany them. What's left is a series of shots indicating transience and fading tradition (a typewriter being plunged into an icy lake, a moving shot from the back of a bicycle down a long forest road, old rundown buildings, etc.) without really evoking those feelings.

The Sacrifice (1986) A Film by Andrei Tarkovsky

The Sacrifice is the unusual brainchild of Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman, two of my favorite filmmakers, and as such there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be one of the greatest films ever made. Granted, Bergman never touched the project. It’s just that his influence rubbed off on Tarkovsky so saliently – the Swedish location, the Swedish cast peopled by Bergman regulars, the penetrating family drama – that it feels as if the two were co-directing. In actuality, Bergman’s piercing psychological investigation via earthbound drama is often in competition with Tarkovsky’s unpsychological, spiritual mysticism, resulting in a film that is split in half by the two sensibilities, never confidently blending them. Yet even this tension produces something of great interest, because while Tarkovsky lacks the tact and fluidity of Bergman drama, this ineptitude only amplifies the onslaught of poetic soul-searching that the film settles into, intensifying it in contrast to the comparatively stale talkiness of the first half. Though not his most accomplished work, like all of Tarkovsky's films, The Sacrifice's bold mystery and haunting imagery only grows in the mind after its completion.

There's also a good chance that this fissure in the film's structure is indebted to Tarkovsky's thematic position that there's a drastic disconnect in the world between humanity's material and spiritual development. Early on, the film's main character, Alexander (Erland Josephson), a retired actor and philosophy professor, muses openly to his deaf-mute son (Tommy Kjellqvist) about this very idea that modern mankind has abandoned any sense of spirituality to become smitten with all forms of material ownership. If not for the beautiful languid pace of the camera as Alexander speaks, roving through the skinny trees and tall grass swaying in a light breeze, the scene would smack of didacticism, existing as a rather pat summation of the film's concerns. The same goes for the rest of the first half as well, as Tarkovsky stages banal philosophical discussions among Alexander's family that are salvaged by the striking choreography of bodies, the way his camera manages to effortlessly glide into grand compositions. In their rote intellectualism and directness, Alexander's conversations with his friend Otto (Allan Edwall), his estranged wife Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), and the rest of their acquaintances are never entirely believable. But when news of a nuclear holocaust surfaces on the television, the family grows convincingly solemn, with the exception of Fleetwood, who hams up a crying fit before thankfully being put out by Otto with a powerful sedative.

Fortunately, the film witnesses a sudden injection of life at this point, even though it ultimately grows quieter, stiller, and more threatening. Alexander makes a bargain with God - in a scene shot from an omniscient aerial perspective by Tarkovsky and regular Bergman cinematographer Sven Nykvist - that if he and his family surrender the totality of their material existence, the nuclear warfare will not occur. Only a character with the kind of all-consuming religious faith that Alexander possesses could argue for such a seemingly hasty and absurd pact, and only a director as gracious and believing as Tarkovsky could bring such dedication and compassion to the presentation of his spiritual pursuit. The Sacrifice cycles through dreams, hallucinations, and real events to depict a complex firsthand understanding of Alexander's spiritual predicament. In the film's eeriest scene, Alexander wakes up in a quiet, black and white space where, after Tarkovsky scans the ground for relics of the past in one of his familiar touches, the coming of a strong wind represents a jolting obstruction to the peaceful dream. The camera then tracks sideways through the house's hallways, glimpsing in the background a nude body skipping away in slow motion, birds taking hesitant flight around her. Color gradually saturates the frame, and miraculously the shot transitions back into reality.



But is there any certainty of this? There's a line in the film about reality being malleable, ever-shifting, and basically an illusion, and this is made concrete by Tarkovsky's tricky approach. He's consistently swapping film stocks, playing with perspective, confusing spatial understandings, interrupting any notion of linear time, making it unclear what a stable basis of physical or temporal reality is. Even before Alexander's pact, Tarkovsky rather noticeably invites harsh distortions to the natural color palette, layering a reddish-brown or greenish filter over the primarily gray interiors of the seaside home. After the news has struck, the family maid, known around the countryside as a witch, is standing outside the house in a patch of tall trees. While looking towards the vicinity of the camera, she calls softly to Alexander, after which the camera slowly dollies in, seemingly predicting his movement. But then Alexander emerges from the right side of the frame; we're not the only ones thrown off, for the woman turns in slight surprise too. Later, Otto and Alexander stare through a window at the sacrificial icon painting that graces the screen during the film's credits. Tarkovsky employs a classic shot-reverse-shot structure with tight close-ups of the painting and the faces of the two men, but once Otto walks out of the frame and Alexander motions forward towards the painting, he is revealed not to be standing right in front of it, as the intimate shots would suggest, but instead across the room from it, a good ten feet away. All of these mutations to traditional film grammar subtly jostle the viewer out of their comfort zone, creating sequences that never quite luxuriate in an accurate approximation of the world but rather approach an abstract, hallucinatory zone.

That Tarkovsky retains belief in Alexander and doesn't resort to smug snickering even when he is sneaking around his family, rummaging through their things, and ultimately burning their house down when he immerses himself fully in his spiritual convictions in the explosive climax is a testament to the deep spiritual connection he has to his artwork. The Sacrifice is not afraid to risk absurdity itself in the radical nature of its structure - long slabs of real time combined with elusive, dreamlike montage - or in the extremity of its content, making it, and its creator, analogous to the central figure, a man doggedly tied to religious piety and opposed to modernistic tendencies. Somehow, the film's most wayward ideas, spawned from lofty concepts about the limits of faith and reason, like the virtual reprise of a scene of levitation in Mirror or the ten-minute-long house-burning sequence, a combination of cinematic grandiosity and improvisational vérité, work in the context of Tarkovsky's consuming seriousness. And of course, this shouldn't devalue the sheer craftsmanship at work, such as the beautiful contours in the bifurcated design or the rich ambiance in the interplay between Bach, obscure Japanese bamboo flutist Watazumido-Shuso, and the subdued natural sounds. Thus, in all its contradictions and minor missteps, The Sacrifice emerges as an essential Tarkovsky work, a film so devoted to its esoteric spiritual themes that it becomes a kind of Bible of its own.

Alexandra (2008) A Film by Aleksandr Sokurov

Of the three films I have seen by the acclaimed Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov, his latest, Alexandra, is without a doubt the most masterfully orchestrated, an eloquent juxtaposition of wartime desolation and maternal compassion set at a Russian army outpost in Grozny, Chechnya. It details the arrival and eventual departure of a young captain's grandmother, Alexandra, who pays the unexpected visit to the 132-degree landscape to reconnect with her grandson Denis whom she hasn't seen in seven years. Their meeting, in keeping in line with Sokurov's continuing evocation of familial dynamics as passionate and quasi-erotic, is marked by great tenderness, the busy occupational killer completely, and surprisingly, enthusiastic and accommodating towards his grandmother's presence. So too are the rest of the wandering soldiers at the camp, individuals who are just as much the focus of the film as Alexandra and Denis. As the film progresses devoid of any oppressive authoritative figures, Sokurov peels away the soldiers' manifest toughness to reveal their boyish qualities and, most significantly, their muted, internalized appreciation for the contradictory motherly figure who roams between the barracks exhaustively but with command, acting as a cautionary symbol for "Mother Russia".

Alexandra, inevitably, has more to do with politics and patriotism than most of Sokurov's work, but at the same time it seems restless in its pursuit to avoid polemic. A contradiction, yes, but the film is subtly loaded with them. Case in point: the lack of bloodshed or violence. It's rare that a film centering around war does not include at least one gunshot, unless one counts Alexandra's shooting of a blank during her brief tutorial with Denis in a sweltering, claustrophobic tank. Through Sokurov's remarkably tactile approach of using detailed close-ups and heightened sound design, guns merely become emblems of hostility, rashness, and unnecessary violence, not weapons. Moreover, the relentless grind of the army camp - the forthright hum of the tanks, the collective clicking of guns, helmets, and boots - extends this quiet metaphor. At one point immediately following a scene depicting two soldiers as they discover Alexandra and watch over her for a few minutes, we are shown a lovely distant shot of a flaming hill at dusk. There is no implication of who witnesses this image, so how better to assign its meaning than as an abrupt reminder on the director's part of how far away he wants to keep the usual episodes of violence and terror that normally staple themselves onto a "war film".

The film is instead rife with love and humanity, and Galina Vishnevskaya's evocative, unobtrusive expressions are immediate proof. Vishnevskaya is already a Russian cultural icon as an opera maestro, and Sokurov's previous documentary, Elegy of Life: Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya, respectfully places her and her cellist husband as subject. She has dabbled with dramatic arts invariably, but that in no way limits her obvious power here as a screen presence. Although her physical body is weary and burnt out, evidenced by her repetition of the line "it's stifling", or "i want to sit down", she claims that her soul can survive another lifetime. This presents itself as another contradiction: wiseness and pride placed aside physical deterioration. Her hair is gray and knotty (we see this intimately when Denis braids it), her skin wrinkled and thin, but her intellectual and moral strength bursts through. No wonder the elderly face is often said to carry the weight of history in it, because Alexandra manages to let every wrinkle communicate. Vishnevskaya herself lived through the blockade of Leningrad and subsequent years of tumultuous Russian history. This inconspicuously makes itself apparent; Alexandra expresses her deeply held beliefs about the futility of war and the importance of family with near impatience and disgust, but she never becomes bludgeoning.



One of the interesting elements of Alexandra is its simultaneous sensuality and mundanity. In setting the film amidst the ruins of Grozny, Sokurov casts real Chechen locals in some scenes, such as when Alexandra peruses a dusty marketplace and meets an elderly vender who invites her into her apartment for tea, or when she is lead back to the barracks by a young Chechen boy who shamelessly asks her to free his people as if she's some prophet from a faraway land. The camera is unassertive but eloquently observant of the locals, giving the film an almost ethnographic scrutiny. All of this lends a cinéma vérité quality that contrasts the vaguely dreamy atmosphere that Sokurov has honed in his career. Aleksandr Burov's cinematography, which brought a similar look to Father and Son, relishes in desaturating the milieu, giving it a measly spectrum of khaki brown and green, and while it lacks the fuzzy porousness of Father and Son's images, it nonetheless creates something that is otherworldly. The languorous camerawork, unconventional editing, punctuated acting, and hypnotically tangible soundtrack also add to Alexandra's sobering remoteness.

Free of the sort of portentous dialogue that often peppers Sokurov's films and detracts from their purely visual moods, Alexandra is consequently his most accessible and consistent work. Sokurov is at his best when he refrains from saying too much literally, which I think is what differentiates his latest from something like Father and Son, specifically. The film is less of a story than a nondescript slice-of-life, a distilled situation given exacting attention in order to extract its peculiar significance. It's an oddly lilting and indirect anti-war film, and this is likely Sokurov's real achievement.

Andrei Rublev (Andrey Rublyov) A Film by Andrei Tarkovsky (1966)

Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev is one of the most monolithic tales ever made centering on art and the life of a painter, yet we never once see anyone carrying out the task. The film, set in 15th century Russia against the backdrop of Tartar invasions, follows the wanderings of the titular figure around the destitute pre-revolutionary landscape. He, Andrei Rublev, the great icon painter and monk, is one of Russia's most significant historical and cultural staples. Yet Rublev only figures tangentially into the equation in the finished film. Amidst a populace of bearded, long-faced men doused in wool robes, Rublev frequently meshes into the locale, sometimes even confused by other characters. It is not until Rublev mistakenly murders a man during the Tartar catastrophe that envelops the cathedral of Vladimir and therefore takes a vow of silence that he manages to delineate his presence among the crowd of austerely Christian, art-obsessed peers. A cataloging of the artistic process, it becomes evident, is not what Andrei Rublev is after; rather, Tarkovsky places emphasis on the holy necessity of art, its ability to shape a culture and mindset, and how its existence is plagued in the face of oppressive authorities.

Tarkovsky himself dealt with a fair share of the latter whilst getting the film produced and distributed. Andrei Rublev is a famous example of the dominance of Soviet Communism over personal artistic statements, bushwhacking its way through several years of censorship episodes, denied screening repeatedly at Cannes until it was eventually given an unfavorable nod at 4 AM on the final day. The film was first exposed internationally in the early 70's, and still it was met with shaky critical reactions. At an unwieldy three-and-a-half hours, Tarkovsky weaves together eight chronologically discontinuous chapters in a remarkably cogent tone of silence, natural sounds, quiet operatic music, and extended musings on art, religion, and history. This is, perhaps detrimentally in many instances, a stark and uncompromising vision. The film is more ascetic than most of Tarkovsky's work and is, by virtue of its historical rigorousness, rambling narrative, and painstakingly detailed, lugubrious scenes of human interaction, often a chore to get through. Most films, even those that lack narrative, offer something at their core to compel the viewer to move forward - an undefinable mystery, a hint at payoff, a guileless energy on the part of the filmmaker - and its not that Andrei Rublev lacks this ineffable quality, but its very difficult to detect.

Ultimately, what kept me hanging on in the film's opaque, intellectually unrelenting structure, was the scattered bouts of inarguably beautiful sequences. A practice of witchcraft held by nude, torch-bearing pagans at dusk, the opening prologue detailing a man determined to the chagrin of his fellow soldiers to take flight on his own sketchily wrought hot air balloon, the shockingly brutal and arrhythmic attack of the sneering Tartars on the monastery, a contemplative afternoon in the bleached cathedral where Rublev refuses to paint "The Last Judgement", the visual mirror of this scene when snow falls on its now corpse-littered floor, and the final chapter when a mad young boy leads a horde of men through the physically demanding process of building a bell. Tarkovsky's signature use of poetic imagery is less ubiquitous, but no less affecting: spilled paint oozing into a river, a slow motion image of a horse rolling around in grass, a young boy descending into a flowing stream after being shot with an arrow. What also comes across in each frame is Tarkovsky's immense sincerity and his true belief in the film's themes - pantheism, cultural divides (between the secular and the mystical, the male and the female, and inactive and proactive lifestyles) and faith among them. After all, Rublev himself can be viewed as Tarkovsky's surrogate, struggling with the same crises, both politically and spiritually.

The Mirror (Zerkalo) A Film by Andrei Tarkovsky (1975)

The Mirror is Andrei Tarkovsky's most cherished film, a dense and heartfelt patchwork of recollections, dreams, and newsreel footage placed within the construct of pre and post-World War II Russia. Tarkovsky reveals the film from the hidden point of view of his poet father Arseny, who often recites thoughtful poetry from his deathbed via narration. Arseny's character is shown only briefly; frequently he is in the scene, but Tarkovsky focuses only on the people and events that surround him, resulting in a heavily subjective narrative that shifts extemporaneously with the father's thoughts. There are several times when we see him as a child in a military school, and also scenes when he is completely absent, presumably at war, suggesting that the moments on screen are entirely constructed, and therefore fleeting. It is often genuinely difficult to surmise which character is being studied, or perhaps from whose mind the scenes are being dreamt up. "In all my films, it seemed to me important to try to establish the links which connect people," Tarkovsky once wrote. In The Mirror, he makes one of his most sincere attempts at doing so, justified by his blatant fixation with close-ups and the rich tapestry of real characters he so lovingly commits to film.

Judging by the fondness for his father that Tarkovsky shows in so much of his writing, it is unsurprising to see him literally attempting to navigate his inner being, hypothesizing about his dreams and experiences as if he had truly formed a metaphysical connection. One gets the sense that Tarkovsky did not simply ask Arseny about what should be filmed. He takes his own memories of his childhood in a house by the edge of a lilting grassy field and projects them into his father's. The film traces many of the happenings in the lives of Andrei's neglected mother and her son Ignat (who is supposedly Tarkovsky himself but looks uncannily like his son Tyapa), such as a doctor who sits quickly to chat with the mother on his way to a nearby town, or, most memorably, a quiet fire that envelops a small wooden cabin aside from the house. Margarita Terekhova takes the bulk of the screen time playing the mother, whom Tarkovsky displays ample compassion for, touching upon her frail existence after being divorced by her husband, caring for the children and juggling a job at a newspaper press. Her flowing blonde hair is one of the visual leitmotifs of the film; whether soaked, dry, or suspended in mid-air, it is at the forefront of Tarkovsky's fascination. In this sense, Tarkovsky transmutes the love he felt for his own wife into his father's love for his mother, yet another one of his honest attempts to reach a spiritual understanding of his family.



The images in The Mirror, equally as with the rest of his oeuvre, fill your soul with nostalgic warmth and subsequently burn into your mind in a way that few other directors have managed. Much of the film deals with what we perceive as concrete recollections, but when dream logic begins to set in, Tarkovsky provides us with some of the most sublime shots in cinema. Perhaps the most disconcerting is a scene that involves his mother soaking her hair in the middle of a dank room of the house, however the room looks separate from reality, a heavenly room with water soaking and running down the entire interior. She rests for a moment with her hair drenched, covering her face as the camera pulls back slowly to watch chunks of the saturated insulation drop to the floor in ever so slight slow motion. In the corner of the room, she approaches a mirror only to see her mother (Tarkovsky's grandmother) staring back at her. There is also a shot that creeps scrupulously through a dark room with open windows, the wind blowing the shades back majestically as a young boy tiptoes towards another partly covered mirror. Wind recurs schematically throughout The Mirror, whether figuratively washing away the momentary relationship of the mother and the doctor or acting as if alive in the forest beside the house, casually knocking a glass bottle off a circular table. Tarkovsky's propensity to slow down the shots minutely while leaving the sound in real time lends these moments an airy, spiritually lucid quality.



Mirrors are, as the title suggests, an essential symbol to take into account in digesting the film. During a scene in which the mother and Ignat visit the house of an unidentified woman expecting a child, Ignat is left alone in a room where he finds himself staring at a mirror. He looks long and hard at it, assessing his soul. It seems he is questioning his very identity, for he has grown up in a jostled wartime, periodically splitting off from his father. When asked by the woman upon return what his name is, he does not respond with his true name. Mirrors act as entities that bring into examination one's spiritual identity. At one point, Arseny's character couples the images with a poem about souls growing tired of being trapped in their physical bodies. Therefore, it appears there is a theme of escapism in The Mirror, which likely turned off Soviet officials as much as the film's unconventional approach. Tarkovsky shows newsreel footage depicting the war, only to follow it by the composition of the family in eternal embrace upon the father's return. It is evidently the war - more than personal differences and hardship - that jolted Tarkovsky's family.

Although Stalker struck me with a greater visceral impact, there is something extremely intimate about The Mirror. A hefty portion of the middle of the film leans towards ponderous, but it is held together by the sense that Tarkovsky lived and died for each frame of film. It is the dedication that he has to evoking memory, dreams, and the states of human consciousness in between which allow the film to stir up so much warmth, familiarity, and unease in its viewers. The film plays almost like a companion piece to his debut Ivan's Childhood, with its predilection to the personal effects of wartime, although it's leagues more subjective. Tarkovsky's poetry is as deep as ever in The Mirror, and admittedly I have only created a sketch reading of it. I hope to see it several more times to expand my appreciation of this pure piece of cinematic art.

Father and Son (Otets i syn) A Film by Aleksandr Sokurov (2003)

In art film, Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov is an island. Although similarly contemplative to current Asian directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien, he has the clairvoyance of a wise historian crumbling to dust on his final days. Just when one believes that they have seen the most furtive celluloid oddities available (such as myself), Sokurov drops another one of his nostalgic tedium bombs. The films he creates feel like they have fallen from cinema heaven, yet in some nook that was never ventured to by other deceased films. Russian Ark flabbergasted me with its technical feat - one that I can't say has ever been accomplished to such an awe inspiring level and therefore earned an otherworldly quality - and now Father and Son has simply puzzled and discomforted me with the elliptical dream world that is presented.

While not jointed enough to be considered narrative cinema and with too much dialogue, music, and camera involvement to be pegged as minimalism, Sokurov's second addition to a trilogy about family evokes, as the title states, a tender father/son relationship. The opening sequence invites us suffocatingly into masculine body contact, an introduction that is sure to nauseate most audiences of the Western world. I wasn't necessarily turned off by this scene, in which the father is perhaps comforting the son who is telling him of a dream, but it certainly had me prepared for an oedipal homoerotic plot. It turns out this is nowhere close to Sokurov's intentions. Like many acknowledged philosophers and artists have sanctioned, he sees love as a universal, even spiritual event that transcends the societal trappings of gender and age. The son Aleksei is a military student living with his father in an angelic apartment where the rooftops are akin to front yards. He has a girlfriend and is interested in his increasingly present masculinity, but the film's attention is solely spent on the holy relationship between parent and child.

Their age gap is meager, causing Sokurov to prod their congruous souls through lingering close-ups. An aura of light is reflected off them and their surroundings throughout the film's entirety, and they seem as likely to vanish into thin air as the clouds in the sky that wisp away to muted blue nothingness. Similarly dreamy are the few wide shots in the film, which are shot with an anamorphic lens to generate dimensionally contorted imagery that will have viewers searching for a remote to correct the picture settings on the television set (i know i did). Father and Son contains very few establishing shots, and it is precisely this setting ambiguity that I have found to be at the heart of Sokurov's films. The father and son appear to live in a dream where only their faces and immediate surroundings are perceivable. As for Russian Ark, despite the fact that it was set in the vast hallways of the Hermitage, there is never an inkling as to what is around this museum. The denizens and locations of Sokurov's films function in a space that is absent of any time periods, or even worldly relations for that matter.

Despite all this spiritual presence however I feel that Father and Son is a tad too spasmodic. Sokurov doesn't ever prioritize one specific image or devise one specific rhythm. The conversations between the father and son are rather illogical and forgettable, and the slight narrative offers up one too many diversions, winding up unsatisfying. Instead there is only one thing to do: dream and soak up the atmosphere, which is magical. However, for all I know, Sokurov is yet another filmmaker whose greatness is difficult to catch.

Ivan's Childhood (Ivanovo detstvo) A Film By Andrei Tarkovsky (1962)

Make no mistake about it; if one is to assess the work of iconic Russian artist Andrei Tarkovsky, the first stop is unavoidably the spectacular poetic imagery that permeates each and every one of his films. In Ivan's Childhood, his stunning and promising debut feature, nearly every shot is a breathtaking black and white composition, showcasing and introducing Tarkovsky's propensity towards natural elements such as water, dirt, trees, and leaves that persistently evoke a spiritual clarity stronger than that of all filmmakers. The film follows a youthful boy named Ivan who connects with three Soviet officers during World War II after he successfully shows he can cross enemy lines unnoticed. Like most living during wartime, Ivan has been influenced heavily; he feels that he can serve the country with dignity as a spy, against the wishes of the officers to send him off to Army Camp.

Unlike most war films, Tarkovsky is uninterested in the battlefield and politics. Instead, he delivers a fusion of dreams and reality to portray the outstandingly potent nostalgia towards childhood that was forged in Ivan when his family was murdered. The film is loaded with bittersweet dream sequences-lucid as ever to avoid sentimentality-that are brimming with creativity, mesmerizing photography, and a sincere personal inflection. The heartbreakingly simple world of Ivan's mind is contrasted with the austere reality of wartime that he is thrusting himself into. This is certainly no groundbreaking idea, but its the uncannily haunting presentation of it that makes it so memorable.

Ivan's Childhood has been said to be not your average Tarkovsky film, but I felt that the film holds many parallels with his distinct visual style, his references to religion, and his anti-war and nostalgic attitudes. The story however is not told as naturally and fluently as most of his other works. There are some oddly inconsequential plot points such as the story of Masha, a female Soviet worker who is pursued by one of Ivan's soldier companions in a dense birch tree forest. Despite the dreamlike mood of the scene, it is nonetheless one that detracts from Ivan's story. There are also minor technical flaws in the film, like the slightly clunky camera movements at times, or the sharp shadows that fall in odd places during some of the conversational scenes. These are forgivable though, given the low-budget that was being worked with. Ingmar Bergman once said that Tarkovsky's art was film as a dream, and this film is precisely that; it's also one of the most potent portraits of wartime's influence and lost childhood.