The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 18-24
Mirror (1975)
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
Mirror is probably Tarkovsky’s most beautiful and most comprehensible movie about Tarkovsky; although it isn’t quite right to say that Andrei Rublev isn’t about Tarkovsky; let it, then, be a tie. There’s a poster for that film here, in the spacious Moscow apartment of a mysteriously ailing man—a poet, or maybe a filmmaker—who dreams about his rural childhood and wartime young-man-hood, giving his young mother his ex-wife’s face. If Mirror is a dying dream, that final reel before someone shuts off the projector, it can only be an artist’s—winter scenes from Brueghel gain life and movement, and the guilt of knowing that our parents, if it weren’t for us, could have had very different lives, acquires a near-unbearable weight. How does one respond to a sacrifice? One can only live with it—or not. Elina Mishuris (November 24, 7pm, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; discussion with the poet Susan Howe follows)