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Mother and Son is one of those films that provides a genuine challenge to anyone trying to clearly define exactly what it is that makes it so damned special. As a reviewer you get used to dealing in the traditional elements of narrative cinema, things like pace, story, humour, dialogue, action and tension. But consider the following plot summary:

A loving and dutiful son comforts his dying mother in her final days.

And that’s it.

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Story-wise there’s nothing else to it. They sit, they talk, he carries her into the woodland that surrounds her isolated home and later leaves her to rest and walks by himself. There, I’ve covered just about everything except the fine detail. And it’s paced so slowly that everything but the soundtrack intermittently comes to a complete halt.

And yet Mother and Son is a beautiful and intensely moving cinematic experience. Director Alexandr Sokurov (Russian Ark, The Sun) is not interested in giving this event a familiar dramatic context, but instead has chosen to capture the essence and emotions of the experience, visually and aurally exploring the all-encompassing feelings of love and impending loss that come from watching someone that close to you fade from the world. There is no set-up, no pre-event character building, no sudden revelations or twists – this is cinema pared down to its narrative basics.

2.21GB | 1h 11m | 962×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/AC1A122DD030696/Mat_i_syn_-_Aleksandr_Sokurov_(1997).mkv

Language(s):Russian,German
Subtitles:English

The post Aleksandr Sokurov – Mat i syn AKA Mother and Son (1997) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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The bridge film between his (Sokurov’s) first decade’s essays into historicized metafilm and the subsequent, fame-making fata morganas is Days of the Eclipse(1988), a patience-testing post-apocalyptic dawdle (based on a novel by the Strugatsky brothers) that plays more like aimless third-world doc than science fiction. Concerning a young doctor stuck in the middle of a rocky wasteland (actually, Turkmenistan, though it could easily pass for any post-colonial hunk of Africa), Daysis maddeningly oblique, visually erratic, and utterly disconnective. Angels, earthquakes, talking corpses, Stalinist iconography, and visual disjunctions may figure in, but for the most part Sokurov designed the film as an elusive tissue of non-happenings and mysterious nexuses, all of it sucking the dusty air of Soviet-satellite poverty.

1.74GB | 2h 11m | 716×456 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/640F3AFF4DF9F26/Dni_Zatmenija.mkv

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English sub/idx muxed

The post Aleksandr Sokurov – Dni Zatmenija AKA The Days Of Eclipse (1988) first appeared on Cinema of the World.