Summary
When WWIII threatens to annihilate his family and who knows how much of the rest of humanity, a retired aesthetics journalist and lecturer contemplates what he may be able to do to avoid cataclysm.
My Viewing
I have seen this movie 3-4 times and still find that it haunts me. It is difficult to watch, slow at times, and answers few of the questions a typical viewer might have. However, I find that I am drawn back to it again and again. It doesn’t answer my questions about death, sacrifice, relationship, or love but it does force me to confront my own views of those things and how I might grow through the expanding of those questions.
If you are looking for answers, keep looking. If you are looking for illumination which will help you ask those questions more deeply, hold contradictions in tension, or simply weep over the plight of humanity, then look no farther than Tarkovsky’s brilliant final film.
My Thoughts
There are lots of resources out there that highlight the making of “The Sacrifice,” Tarkovsky’s death, and the almost end-of-life-confession that it seems to be so I will refrain from waxing on too much about that. Suffice it to say that this was a painful film to make during which Tarkovsky was dying of cancer, estranged from his beloved son who was being kept in the USSR, and tragedy struck as the film’s climactic scene in which a house burns down was completely lost and the film was threatened to never be finished. It was a beast to make and a tribute to Tarkovsky’s particular approach to film as being an act of suffering and sacrifice on the part of the director.
The film itself, luckily, is a masterpiece. As one watches the rest of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre, it seems this was a film he was always working toward, honing his style, craft, and poetic/philosophical thought as he went.
The film begins with Alexander (Erland Josephson, “Cries & Whispers”) helping his young son, ever referred to only as Little Man, plant a tree by the water and walks with him back to their home, pontificating the entire time, as a retired teacher might, to his mute son, who is recovering from a medical procedure.
We learn from the local postman that it is Alexander’s birthday and that there is to be a gathering at his home tonight in celebration but the celebration is short lived as the sound of warplanes overhead signals the apparent beginnings of WWIII. As the different members of the family all react differently to the impending doom that is heralded by these planes, Alexander is convinced that he is meant to do something that will save his family though it may cost him everything he loves.
As the world holds its breath, waiting for news that Covid-19 has spread or has begun to be contained, it felt eerie to watch a film about WWIII and potential annihilation. I felt a kinship with Alexander as I haven’t felt before. The desperation to do something to help, the powerlessness we feel when we can’t, the emptiness of our small lives as we simply wait for death to find us, take us, or spare us, it is all in Alexander’s desperation and hopelessness as he clings to any and every wild idea about what may save his family from suffering and death.
In his character, I see myself mirrored, as he laments the endless words he has expelled from his mouth over the many years and how they have ultimately failed to do anything to spare anyone this calamity, as he hints at some inkling he has that he should be doing something, and the incredulity people treat him with when he believes the thing that must be done is something everyone else will scoff at and misunderstand.
This problem of knowing, understanding, and being understood is at the heart of human existence and longing. It is an experience we all know and despair of as we push it to the side over and over, hoping that we will be understood, understand, and be able to change simply by force of explanation the circumstances which pain us and our fellow human beings. We feel it when we watch the daily news tragedy play, are told by our spouses that they don’t love us anymore, or sit alone in our beds at 4 am wondering what is wrong with the world.
Lime most meaningful works of art, “The Sacrifice” holds no answer for the literalist who might seek to find Tarkovsky’s solution to this problem. It is because art is not a solution to anything. It is the problem itself. It is an attempt to make knowable the unknowable chambers of the heart. It is a fool’s errand which can only be run hard, despite its uselessness.
Perhaps that is why I find it so illuminating, like a window being thrown open. The film itself is not the thing we marvel at or watch for. It is the light that is allowed in by the window that makes it valuable not for the craftsmanship of the portal, the quality of the glazing, or the sparkling of the glass but for the light it sheds upon the inside of our own houses, minds, psyche, hearts, or souls.
The subject illuminated for examination is ourselves.
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