Well, I wouldn’t want to close off interpretation of that wonderful movie, but there are some suggestions, especially as I think a lot of the action of the film is clearer to a Russian audience familiar with the historical events depicted. Further clarification is in the collection of Tarkovsky’s scripts, which includes a fuller version of the script for Zerkalo.
So here’s my (tentative, possible) take: In the film, the narrator remembers being raised by his mother, who took care of him after his father went off to fight in WWII (known in Russia as “the Great Patriotic War”). His mother originally worked in a Soviet publishing house (their terror at a word being misprinted may be a reference to the real-life case of a newspaper publisher who was sent to the gulags when a transposed letter resulted in a loyal Stalinist minister being given the name of an excommunicated Old Bolshevik). But without his father, their family becomes terribly poor, and must go to distant relatives in the hopes of some food or a place to sleep. The narrator, a little older, is taken into the children’s military corps, where he’s a washout, though not as embarrassing as the city kid from Leningrad (a.k.a. the “blockadnik”, one of the children sent to the country to escape the terrible starvation prevalent during the siege of Leningrad). Years later, the narrator (never seen, only heard) has grown into a novelist, with a sad ex-wife, a distant child, and a mother who berates him over the phone, as well as neighbors who’ve never gotten over their experiences during the Spanish Civil War, when many Spanish Communists got aid from the USSR to fight Franco.
It’s worth noting that one of the things that makes the action hard to follow is Tarkovsky’s deliberate casting of the same people as figures in the past and present. This reinforces the film’s larger point—-that past and present are inextricable, constantly bleeding into each other—-but it does make it a little hard to tell who’s who.
ZERKALO / The Mirror / Tarkovsky almost 3 years ago
Well, I wouldn’t want to close off interpretation of that wonderful movie, but there are some suggestions, especially as I think a lot of the action of the film is clearer to a Russian audience familiar with the historical events depicted. Further clarification is in the collection of Tarkovsky’s scripts, which includes a fuller version of the script for Zerkalo.
So here’s my (tentative, possible) take: In the film, the narrator remembers being raised by his mother, who took care of him after his father went off to fight in WWII (known in Russia as “the Great Patriotic War”). His mother originally worked in a Soviet publishing house (their terror at a word being misprinted may be a reference to the real-life case of a newspaper publisher who was sent to the gulags when a transposed letter resulted in a loyal Stalinist minister being given the name of an excommunicated Old Bolshevik). But without his father, their family becomes terribly poor, and must go to distant relatives in the hopes of some food or a place to sleep. The narrator, a little older, is taken into the children’s military corps, where he’s a washout, though not as embarrassing as the city kid from Leningrad (a.k.a. the “blockadnik”, one of the children sent to the country to escape the terrible starvation prevalent during the siege of Leningrad). Years later, the narrator (never seen, only heard) has grown into a novelist, with a sad ex-wife, a distant child, and a mother who berates him over the phone, as well as neighbors who’ve never gotten over their experiences during the Spanish Civil War, when many Spanish Communists got aid from the USSR to fight Franco.
It’s worth noting that one of the things that makes the action hard to follow is Tarkovsky’s deliberate casting of the same people as figures in the past and present. This reinforces the film’s larger point—-that past and present are inextricable, constantly bleeding into each other—-but it does make it a little hard to tell who’s who.
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