Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on March 09, 2002 at 07:26:54

Hey Viktor! Wahddya know about this guy? What's hot, what's not? The descriptions in the catalog are soporific in themselves: "Formal elements converge to reinforce the elegaic tone: the whispering wind, crashing waves, sea-gull cries, the glissandi of violins..." Oh God I can't take it any longer!

clark

Worlds away: the films of Sokurov

By Leighton Klein, Globe Staff, 3/9/2002

Most movies have a beginning, middle, and end. Even if you've never seen them before, you know where you are: Context is provided and characters introduced, relationships explored, and then a conclusion is reached, generally through sex, gunfire, or both.

The work of Russian director Alexander Sokurov is about as far as you can get from this carved-in-celluloid norm. Beyond being pointedly noncommercial - how could one even get a major studio to look at ''The Second Circle,'' a stark look at a son's struggle to arrange his father's burial, much less manage some product placement along the way? - his films are often continuations of decades-long spiritual quests. There is no beginning, just as there can be no end.

''Art prepares a person for death,'' Sokurov told Cineaste magazine in an interview last year. ''It helps one to make peace with the fact of mortality.'' Not exactly sentiments that make the cash registers ring, even if they resonate with a part of us most suppress.

Sokurov is at last the subject of a comprehensive North American retrospective, which began locally at the Harvard Film Archive last night. It's a chance to see many rarely shown films, and to look at others with a more attentive eye. Twenty-seven will be shown, from his first, ''Maria'' (1978-88), an ode to the passing of a peasant woman's way of life, to his latest, ''Taurus'' (2001), an idiosyncratic portrait of Lenin's twilight days.

Any exploration of Sokurov's work begins with ''Mother and Son'' (1997), arguably his masterpiece. With crystalline simplicity it details the last day in the life of a terminally ill woman as she's cared for by her son. Plot, dialogue, and location are stripped down to their bones so that the characters' love and respect for each other stand free, and are all the more beautiful for the sorrow of the approaching end.

The film is painterly in an almost literal sense: Sokurov frequently shoots through filters that skew and flatten the image, pushing the aesthetic closer to Constable than to Tarkovsky, a filmmaker to whom he is frequently compared.

''The Second Circle'' (1990) approaches the same subject, the death of a parent, but inverts the relationship and the situation: A son who hardly knew his father must deal with his death in an unknown snowbound city. It's the blackest of comedies, totally deadpan: The undertaker pinches the dead man's cigarettes, tries to drive up the funeral bill, and curses like a stevedore when she isn't paid upfront. The son is only trying to get rid of the body and find some kind of solace, but then when its finally gone, there's an emptiness that's worse.

Literature is central to Sokurov's view of the world, and his adaptations give no quarter. Even if one knows the source of ''Whispering Pages'' - several passages drawn from Dostoevski's ''Crime and Punishment'' - the result is at first viewing nearly impenetrable. A nameless figure wanders through a city of dank passageways and menacing passersby. He's at turns solicited, threatened, and beaten, and then confesses a murder he may or may not have committed. Rain and fog are everywhere, and only Sokurov's persistent questions shine forth: ''You won't abandon me, will you?'' the man asks a woman, and receives no answer.

''Stone'' (1992) takes a similarly oblique approach to the work of Chekhov. It's the perfect date movie - assuming you're stepping out with Susan Sontag, who proclaimed it one of the 10 best films of the 1990s. The guard in a museum surprises an intruder who bears a resemblance to the great writer. He will neither explain himself nor go away, and after a long night spent wandering the museum, the two end up sharing an improvised dinner of sausage and ink. The film highlights Sokurov's profound love of classical music - Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler are as present as Chekhov himself.

After such rarefied works, ''Moloch'' (1999) comes as an off-kilter surprise, all the more so because its subject is that least sympathetic of historical figures, Adolf Hitler. Centering on the relationship between the great dictator and his doomed mistress, Eva Braun, the film is funny and tragic. Its absurd playfulness simultaneously humanizes Hitler (it's hard to take the man seriously when he's in his underwear chasing Braun around a conference table) and reveals him in his madness.

Underneath the film's sendup of a mad regime, however, is a deadly serious look at a cult of personality. Like ''Taurus'' and the diptych ''An Example of Intonation'' (1981) and ''Soviet Elegy'' (1989), two cutting portraits of Boris Yeltsin, ''Moloch'' doesn't turn away from the underside of power, nor our role in making it possible.

Taken together, Sokurov's films are worlds away from what is seen as cinema here. They're music written in images, existence reduced to its purest elements and scattered across the screen, at turns unforgiving and radiant.

Leighton Klein can be reached by e-mail at lklein@globe.com.