DVD ADDICT : Deeply personal

DVD ADDICT : Deeply personal

THE SECOND CIRCLE ('Krug vtoroy', Russia, 1990, colour) Directed by Aleksandr Sokurov and starring Pyotr Aleksandrov and Nadezhda Rodnova. Full screen (1.37:1) transfer, 85 min. In Russian with optional English subtitles. All-zone, NTSC

PLALAI FAIFA

Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov's one-take stunner Russian Ark dropped jaws and attracted a lot of attention from critics a few years back, and since then his ongoing series of films about 20th-century tyrants has won him an international audience. But before those movies appeared he had already attracted a small but passionate following with a work of a very different kind, the haunting Mother and Son, released in 1997.

More a visual poem than a conventional movie, it was almost completely innocent of anything resembling a plot: In a rural countryside a young man attends his dying mother. At her request he carries her out into the countryside and then returns with her to her rustic cabin, where she dies. What made Mother and Son unique was its visual style and atmosphere. Sokurov shot the panoramic landscapes through which the nameless young man carries his mother using lenses and painted mirrors that subtly distorted it into something slightly unreal, perhaps half-remembered, its evocativeness enhanced by the soughing wind and other natural sounds on the track.

Now Kino has released The Second Circle, which originally appeared seven years earlier in 1990. Like Mother and Son it feels deeply personal, and seems much closer in style and mood to that film than Father and Son - a more obvious companion piece made in 2003. The Second Circle, too, focuses on a son left behind by a dying parent, and its visual style is as striking as that of the later film, although its mood is far less serene.

A nameless young man (Aleksandrov) returns to the bleak and impoverished Siberian town where his father has just died, and the movie follows him as he stumbles through the bureaucratic procedures required for the funeral. He seems devastated by his father's death, and there is a suggestion in his halting, repetitive speech and out-of-touch manner that he may be mentally ill.

Strangers show up to help him wash the corpse (using snow, as the water pipes are frozen), embalm it, place it in a coffin, and take it away. Afterwards he wanders around his dead father's room, looking at the few things left behind, seemingly trying to understand the experience of a parent who has been long absent from his own life.

He seems anaesthetised, almost catatonic at times, but the delicate emotions that exist behind the man's blank exterior can always be felt. There is a memorable scene in which he sits on the floor outside the room where his father's corpse lies. He faces away from the doorway, clinging to the rim of a filthy sink. Behind him a trio of men, two of them teenagers, embalm the corpse, shouting out gruesome instructions to each other. Gradually the camera rises so that the sink, which has been hiding the son's face, descends to the point where it reveals the expression of a person who feels himself to be utterly lost.

Equally powerful is an episode where a woman funeral director (Rodnova), clad in tight pants and radiating ruthless efficiency, becomes so exasperated at the man's vagueness and indecisiveness that she loses all patience and bullies him ferociously, shouting at and insulting him as if he were a misbehaving child. He reacts by retreating into childlike clumsiness and inarticulateness.

His state of mind is also reflected in the film's visual style. Colours are muted to the point that it seems to have been filmed in sepia, with intense hues occasionally bleeding weakly through the brownish murk. Fog and smoke often drift over and blur the scene, and the image is often grainy and unclear.

Some commentators have seen The Second Circle as a political film, perhaps a thematic relative of Solzhenitsyn's novel, The First Circle. Since it was made soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it quite likely contains political references that ideas that will be evident to Russian viewers - the bureaucratic inhumanity of the funeral director, with her heavy caseload, for example.

But non-Russian viewers will see it as an eloquent expression of the spiritual numbness that overcomes those who are alienated from the world and feel that they have lost everything. It is hard to forget a remarkable scene in which the young man, obsessed by his dead father, uncovers the corpse in the middle of the night and looks into it eyes. Sokurov cuts back and forth between the two to show that the living man and his dead father have more in common now than they did when the old man was alive.

This description makes The Second Circle sound like more of a downer than it actually is. Even if its subject matter is grim, it has a dreamy atmosphere and unique visual beauty that will seduce anyone who enjoys Tarkovsky's later films. Still, anyone who becomes impatient with "slow" movies should probably steer clear of this one.

When a film has a look as stylised as this one has, it is difficult to evaluate the quality of the transfer. Since the director oversaw the process himself, (removing what he considered to be five superfluous minutes in the process), what we see here is probably what he wants us to see.

I bought my copy online from amazon.com.

Bangkok Post
Friday January 12, 2007