Midway upon life’s journey, I found myself lost in a dark wood. – Dante, Inferno Canto I

Most of my favorite films have a self-referential component. I’m thinking of films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation and Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2. Like a hallway of mirrors, the subject of these films becomes the filmmaker and the creative process itself.

Such films can go awry and become self-indulgent reverie. But in the hands of the masters, the introspective study of the director’s psyche offers insights into the universal struggles of human nature.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1975 film, The Mirror, is the apotheosis of this self-referential genre. While initially rejected by its studio and receiving only a limited release in Russia, its reputation has grown over the years. In 2012, it ranked 19th on Sight & Sound’s critics poll of the 50 best films ever made and has become the most highly regarded film in Tarkovsky’s formidable oeuvre.

I’ve seen The Mirror at least five or six times, and it gets better each time. I’ve been wanting to write about the film since I first saw it years ago. So why now? The main reason is because I finally have the time. Another reason is that like the film’s main character I am “midway upon life’s journey”, though unlike him, not quite 40 and thankfully not dying.

The timing is also interesting from a political standpoint. As anti-Russian sentiment is on the rise, the film is an apt reminder of the immense contributions of Russian art and science. If I were to list my favorite books, films, and composers, about half the list would comprise Russian artists. Russian literature, in particular, has had a huge impact on my life. I welcome the chance to show a bit of my appreciation in today’s political climate.

In fact, The Mirror intertwines a personal reflection on Tarkovsky’s formative experiences with a political reflection on Russia’s national identity and wartime traumas. It combines contemporary scenes, flashbacks, dreams and newsreel footage into a non-linear narrative. While this makes for a confusing experience for first-time viewers, the plot is actually very simple.

The film depicts resonant moments from the boyhood, adolescence and adulthood of Tarkovsky’s alter ego, Alexei, strung together in stream-of-consciousness fashion. The phases correspond to three time periods: pre-war (1930’s), wartime (1940’s), and present day (1960’s/70’s), where the 40-year old Alexei lays dying of an unspecified illness (as much spiritual as physical).

The simplest summary of The Mirror comes from Tarkovsky himself:

[The Mirror] is the remembrances of a man who recalls the most important moments in his life, a man dying and acquiring a conscience. The film aimed at reconstructing the lives of people who I loved dearly and knew well. I wanted to tell the story of the pain suffered by one man because he feels he cannot repay his family for all they have given him. He feels he hasn’t loved them enough, and this idea torments him.” – Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on The Cinema

The Mirror is about the attempt to recover what is lost through time: people, places, events and ultimately oneself. It’s a Proustian task. “A futile endeavor!” you say. “One can’t recover lost time. What’s done is done. Let go of the past and move on.” But as Tarkovsky suggests, the past is both a retreat that comforts us and a demon that torments us.

Perhaps the only way to exorcise this demon is to confront it. Perhaps the only way to overcome the regret of not having loved others enough is to recollect them through the lens of our wiser selves. Perhaps, like Dante’s pilgrim, the road to salvation leads through hell.

It’s no coincidence that the famous first line of Dante’s Inferno, quoted above, is quoted twice during the film. This struggle to make sense of time and loss and find one’s way out of “the dark wood” underlies The Mirror’s self-reflexive, autobiographical character.

The self-reflexiveness (or mirroring) of the film occurs on several levels. First, the ordering and selection of the scenes reflects the narrator’s own subjectivity — specifically, his memories, dreams and obsessions. Second, mirrors and reflections play a prominent role in the scenes themselves.

Third, and most eyebrow-raising, Tarkovsky casts the same actress to play his wife and his mother, and the same actor to play his son and himself as a boy. Further, he casts his actual mother as his present day mother, his ex-wife in a unflattering cameo and his father to read his own poems in voiceover.

It’s not easy to communicate one’s inner thoughts and feelings. The Mirror‘s power lies in its dream-like images more than its words. The difficulty in communicating through words is set up in the film’s opening scene. Alexei’s son turns on the TV and watches a boy with a stutter being placed under hypnosis. The hypnotist then commands the boy to open his eyes and “speak!”

Later, the adult Alexei says to his mother: “I haven’t spoken for three days. Being silent for a while is good. Words can’t really express a person’s emotions. They’re too inert. I just dreamed about you, Mama.” The Mirror is Tarkovsky’s attempt to communicate those experiences and emotions that are too profound for words. And it is self-aware about its methods.

The visual language of The Mirror is intricate and symbolic. Its basic vocabulary consists of elements, archetypes and oppositions: earth and wind, fire and water, light and reflection, mother and child, child and man. The repetition and juxtaposition of these elements create some of the film’s most indelible images. One example is this beautiful sequence shot (a scene consisting of one unbroken take) in which Alexei recalls a childhood memory of their barn burning down:

This scene, based a real episode from Tarkovsky’s childhood, evokes bittersweet emotion by contrasting the comfort of childhood domestic life with the incendiary force of change. In the shot of the burning barn, we see the juxtaposition of fire, water, and earth in a single shot – first glimpsed through a reflection in the mirror.

This elemental motif is repeated in different variations throughout the film. The work as symbols with psychological significance for both the director and viewer. We learn that this scene takes place the year when Alexei’s father left for the war – not certain to ever return. These type of images, and the deep emotions they represent, seep into the viewer’s mind and linger long after viewing.

Here is another example of The Mirror‘s visual poetry, a dream sequence that occurs just after the barn-burning scene:

Here, we see another permutation of the same elements: mother, fire, water, mirror. The tone remains bittersweet in its juxtaposition of domestic comfort and stability (the childhood bed, the mother washing her hair) with disturbing signs of alienation (the mother’s hidden face) and decay (the collapsing ceiling). This scene also introduces sound motifs, such as the squeaking of a hand rubbed across the mirror, that recur during transitions from one time to another.

The focus on Tarkovsky’s mother here – her love, sacrifice, aging and sadness – is central to the film in all its Freudian glory. In the present day, Alexei’s estranged wife, played by the same amazing actress Margarita Tereshkova, taunts him:

What kind of relationship do you want with your mother? One like you had in childhood is impossible now. You speak of feeling guilty, because she sacrificed her life for you. There’s nothing you can do about it now.

Meanwhile, his distant father figure’s poetry, read over grueling wartime footage, counsels stoicism and offers icy hope of redemption:

I trust not premonitions and I fear not omens. There is no death. We’re all immortal. All is immortal. Fear not death at seventeen nor at seventy. There’s only reality and light. There’s neither dark nor death in this, our world. We’ve reached the beach, and I am one of those who pull in the net when immortality arrives in batches.

And Alexei pines for his lost youth, radiant in his memory but drowned in the sadness of its irretrievability and his father’s disappearance:

I keep having the same dream. It seems to be forcing me to return to the bittersweet site of my grandfather’s house, where I was born on the table 40 years ago….Then something happens and I stop dreaming, of the house and the pines by the house of my childhood. Then I grieve and wait for the dream that will make me a child again, and I’ll be happy again knowing that all still lies ahead and nothing is impossible.

Does Alexei succeed in his attempt to recover his soul from the wreckage of time? Do any of us stand a chance in recovering from the illness of our distorted and confused loves? To piece together the shards of memory and make it out of the dark wood? The film’s answer is: yes and no.

No, in the sense that (spoiler alert) The Mirror ends with Alexei’s death and sticks to its tone of elegiac sadness. It resists any easy redemption. Yes, in the sense that the final scene offers some hope of rebirth. On his death bed, Alexei cups a bird that is apparently dead or seriously wounded. But when he releases it, as his soul leaves his body, it seems to take flight on its own. It then cuts to a rhapsodic final dream sequence that encapsulates all of the film’s self-reflective themes.

For me the most haunting image in The Mirror is its last: as the music falls silent, the camera pulls back from a scene of the young Alexei, his brother and grandmother (played by his actual mother) and recedes slowly into the dark pine woods. Nothing so perfectly captures the bittersweetness of seeing the elusive past recede into memory — it is the light recalled from inside the dark wood.