When Ignat returns to the woman at the table, she has vanished, though the condensation from her teacup momentarily remains. Ignat answers a knock at the door, which turns out to be a woman who says she has the wrong apartment. At her request, Ignat reads a passage from a letter by Pushkin and receives a telephone call from his father Aleksei. ![]() In the next scene, in Aleksei's apartment, Ignat meets with a strange woman sitting at a table. This is followed by newsreel scenes from the Spanish Civil War and of a balloon ascent in the U.S.S.R. Back in the postwar period, Aleksei quarrels with his ex-wife, Natalia, who has divorced him and is living with their son Ignat. She is worried about a mistake she may have overlooked, but is comforted by her colleague Liza ( Alla Demidova), who then seemingly reduces her to tears with withering criticism. Switching back to the prewar time frame, Maria is seen rushing frantically to her workplace as a proofreader at a printing press. In the postwar time frame, Aleksei is heard talking with his mother on the phone while rooms of an apartment are seen. In a dream sequence, Maria is washing her hair. The young Aleksei, his mother and sister watch as the family barn burns down. ![]() The exterior and interior of Aleksei's grandfather's country house are seen. After the opening titles, a scene is set in the countryside during prewar times in which Aleksei's mother Maria, also called Masha and Marusya, speaks with a doctor who chances to be passing by. The film opens with Aleksei's adolescent son Ignat switching on a television and watching the examination of a man with a stutter by a physician who finally manages to make her patient say without disruption: "I can talk". Memories such as the evacuation from Moscow to the countryside during the war, a withdrawn father and his own mother, who worked as a proofreader at a printing press, feature prominently. Mirror draws heavily on Tarkovsky's own childhood. The film switches among three different time frames: prewar (1935), wartime (1940s), and postwar (1960s or '70s). The film's structure is discontinuous and nonchronological, without a conventional plot, and combines incidents, dreams, memories, and newsreel footage. The adult Aleksei is only briefly glimpsed, but is present as a voice-over in some scenes including substantial dialogue. ![]() Mirror depicts the thoughts, emotions and memories of Aleksei, or Alyosha (Ignat Daniltsev), and the world around him as a child, adolescent, and 40-year-old. It has also found favor with many Russians for whom it remains their most beloved of Tarkovsky's works. The film has grown in reputation since its release and is now considered one of the greatest films of all time, ranking 19th in Sight & Sound's 2012 critics' poll and ninth in the directors' poll. Mirror initially polarized critics and audiences, with many finding its narrative incomprehensible. The film's loose flow of oneiric images has been compared with modernist literature's stream of consciousness technique. Its cinematography slips between color, black-and-white, and sepia. The film combines contemporary scenes with childhood memories, dreams, and newsreel footage. It unfolds around memories recalled by a dying poet of key moments in his life and in Soviet culture. Mirror is structured in the form of a nonlinear narrative, with its main concept dating back to 1964 and undergoing multiple scripted versions by Tarkovsky and Aleksandr Misharin. Innokenty Smoktunovsky provides voiceover and Eduard Artemyev the incidental music and sound effects. The film features Margarita Terekhova, Ignat Daniltsev, Alla Demidova, Anatoly Solonitsyn, Tarkovsky's wife Larisa Tarkovskaya and his mother Maria Vishnyakova. It is loosely autobiographical, unconventionally structured, and incorporates poems composed and read by the director's father, Arseny Tarkovsky. ![]() Mirror (Russian: Зеркало, romanized: Zerkalo) is a 1975 Russian drama film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.
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