The film festival has begun - one of my favourite times of year. I find the trick is to concentrate on films that are unlikely to receive a general theatrical release, thus films like Fahrenheit 9/11, The Motorcycle Diaries, and In My Father's Den, can safely be postponed without fear of missing out.
I watched Father and Son this evening, a film by Aleksandr Sokurov, whose previous film was Russian Ark - the stunning, yet difficult single-shot film through the Hermitage and 300 years of Russian society. Father and Son is a return to a more traditional format, yet it remains deliberate in the lack of narrative and celebration of the aesthetic. For the film is stunningly beautiful, lit as if bathed in a pale golden glow of a post-Renaissance painting.
Father and Son concerns the paternal relationship implicit in the title, and the film frequently features a highly charged eroticism as the two men talk, play, fight and exercise in their rooftop apartment. The son, a young military recruit, and his father, a military veteran who would barely be 20 years older seem to exist in a brooding state of melancholy, their emotions floating just below the surface. The acting is subdued, and the emotions of the characters tend to be communicated as much by their surroundings, their location in the frame, the background noise and music, and the lighting rather than what they say and do, as they say and do very little.
In these aspects, the film is a techinical marvel, and serves to heighten the textural feel and languid pace. The background chiming of a town clock, the squawking of seagulls, Tchaikovsky on the radio, the shape of a roof suggesting a greater space below, the pre-Raphaelite sky, the clatter of a tram along the street. Father and Son is a very internalised film in its use of space, much of it set in the apartment and on the roof above, and the camera rarely moves beyond a medium close-up and takes in a long shot of the location. Even during a sojurn out into the city, the details remain the focus - the junction of tram tracks, reflections of the city in the windows, the steep and winding pedestrian streets. The actual city was never identified - it was very Mediterranean in its architecture and topography (the credits name Lisbon), and so it becomes almost a non-place, transplanted from the fatherland to suggest the father-son relationship as being universal, free of time and space.
Sokurov does not allow much humour into the film, and the obtuse, mysterious approach to the subject matter does not always make an easy watch. I do not pretend to understand all of it, the biblical subtext ("A father's love crucifies, a loving son lets himself be crucified") is something that I am still grappling with - Father and Son demands a second viewing in order to absorb it all in. However, I don`t think this really matters - the film is lovely to look at and enaging to listen to, and there is a power inherent in the film that seems to triumph over complete comprehension.
