Stars: Ignat Daniltsev, Anatoly Solonitsyn, Margarita Terekhova

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

Summary: An autobiographical film based on the life of Andrei Tarkovsky. Also a look at Stalin's influence on the people of Russia. Russian dialogue.

With THE MIRROR, legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky crafts perhaps his most profound and compelling film. What started off for Tarkovsky as a planned series of interviews with his own mother evolved into a lyrical and complex circular meditation on love, loyalty, memory, and history. Time shifts and generations merge as a single extraordinary actress (Margarita Terekhova) plays the narrator's former wife as well as his mother. Tarkovsky's memories as well as those of his mother are intermingled as a dark, sumptuous, and dreamlike pre-World War II Russia is evoked, accompanied throughout by the voice of Tarkovsky's father reading his own elegiac poetry. The spectacle of nature and its ubiquitous and ever-shifting presence is captured by Tarkovsky's camera as if by magic--the family cabin nestled deep in the verdant woods, a barn on fire in the middle of a gentle rainstorm, a gigantic wind enveloping a man as he walks through a wheat field--all creating indelible images with deep if mysterious emotional resonance. As the timeline shifts between the narrator's generation and his mother's, newsreel footage of Russian wars, triumphs, and disasters are juxtaposed with imagined scenes from the past, present, and future, crafting a silently lucid cinematic panopticon of memory, history, and nature.

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This visually stunning film is the product of a collaboration of award-winning graphic novelist Neil Gaiman (creator of the much-lauded Sandmanseries), his frequent collaborator Dave McKean (Cages), and The Jim Henson Company, themselves no strangers to elaborate fantasies such as The Dark Crystal. and Labyrinth. As with the latter film, MirrorMaskfocuses on a young woman unhappy with her daily existence; here, the artistically inclined Helena (Stephanie Leonides), is at odds with her circus performer parents. When a careless insult appears to send her mother (Gina McKee) into a coma, Helena withdraws into the dark and elaborate world of her drawings, in which a scenario very similar to her predicament in the real world is unfolding. Gaiman and director McKean create arresting images to populate Helena's world, and the Henson Company brings them vividly to life with CGI; though the story is occasionally murky, the fantasy elements are imaginative enough to enthral what will undoubtedly be the film's toughest customers--younger viewers. --Paul Gaita

Aspect Ratio:	4:3 Full Frame
Main Language:	Russian
Region:	Region 0
Special Features:	Trailers, Documentary - 1. MEMORY, 2. Innokenty Solinitsyn & Innokenty Smoktunovsky, Interviews - 1. Eduard Artemyev - Composer, 2. Aleksander Solinitsyn - Screenwriter, Stills Gallery
Subtitles:	English
Year:	1974
Release Date:	July 29, 2002
Runtime:	102 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	A R T 020 D V D
Keywords:	Subtitled, General, Mirror, Russian, Drama, Rescheduled, Zerkalo
Genre:	Drama