Mother and Son

MOTHER AND SON   ***

Aleksandr Sokurov

1997

IDEA:  In a purgatorial countryside, a son carries his mother through her last corporeal hours.

BLURB:  If it’s possible to be both eternal and evanescent, close to the surface and remote, to convey a sense of being present and irrecoverably missing, then Mother and Son manages it. This seemingly paradoxical condition is, of course, at the core of cinema, the ultimate phantom art, and Sokurov conjures something of that distilled essence in his film’s ghostly wash of images. Alternately and sometimes all at once warped, smudged, faded, and stained, the tableaux that make up Mother and Son look like old photographic artifacts exhumed from some otherworldly bog, set in motion so tentative it’s hard to say if it’s stasis or movement that is being disrupted. Regardless of one’s interpretation or iconic recognition of this aesthetic, the myriad optical effects foreground the mutability of the filmic image and make us conscious of our mediated perception. Because mortality is a theme of the film, the images take on especially spectral qualities: they appear, embalmed, from some unknown past time and space, their existential contents simultaneously frozen and temporarily reanimated within the brief 72 minutes of the film’s runtime. Mother and Son’s brevity preempts any claims of plodding self-seriousness, which a longer film could have easily invited. It’s also what reinforces its austere, porous beauty, flickering like a candle in a cinematic gloaming.