Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror is less a movie and more a cinematic séance, summoning ghosts from the past in a fractured, beautiful dream. The film rejects traditional storytelling; instead, it offers a stream of consciousness from a dying narrator. Consequently, watching it feels like leafing through someone else’s soul.
Detailed Summary
Understanding The Mirror requires abandoning the need for a linear plot. The film is a collage of memories, dreams, and historical newsreels, all from the perspective of an unseen narrator, Alexei. These fragments constellate around key moments in his life, jumping between three time periods: his pre-war childhood in the 1930s, his adolescence during the war, and his present-day reality in the 1970s.
The Pre-War Idyll
The film frequently returns to a sun-drenched dacha, a country house where a young Alexei lives with his mother, Maria, and his sister. His father has recently left the family, a wound that clearly never heals. These scenes are impressionistic and full of potent symbols. For instance, a barn suddenly catches fire, watched with a strange calm by the family. In another sequence, Maria believes she sees her estranged husband returning, only for him to be a passing doctor. Furthermore, this period is depicted as a lost paradise, a source of both warmth and deep-seated melancholy for the adult Alexei.
Wartime and Adolescence
In contrast, the wartime sequences are stark and tense. The family has been evacuated from their home, and the relationship between Maria and her children is strained. One notable scene involves Alexei and his sister at a military training facility where he accidentally drops a dummy grenade. Subsequently, his harsh instructor berates him with a political tirade. These memories are tinged with fear and the harsh realities of Soviet life. They also show Maria’s struggle as a single mother working at a printing press, terrified of making a costly error.
The Fractured Present
Meanwhile, in the present, the adult Alexei is dying from an unnamed illness. We only hear his voice, often in strained conversations. He argues with his ex-wife, Natalia, who is strikingly played by the same actress as his young mother. This deliberate choice suggests Alexei is forever replaying his maternal relationships. Moreover, his own son, Ignat, is distant. An important scene finds Ignat alone in the apartment when a mysterious woman asks him to read a letter from Pushkin. This moment, like many others, blurs the line between reality, memory, and spiritual visitation. Ultimately, Alexei’s present is defined by regret and a desperate attempt to make sense of his past.
Newsreels and Poems
Tarkovsky constantly weaves documentary newsreel footage into the narrative. For instance, we see soldiers crossing Lake Sivash, the Spanish Civil War, and the Sino-Soviet border conflict. These public histories serve as a backdrop to Alexei’s private one, suggesting that personal memory cannot be separated from the sweep of history. In addition, the narrator’s voice periodically recites poems written by Tarkovsky’s own father, Arseny Tarkovsky. These poems act as the film’s philosophical spine, articulating themes of time, love, and mortality.
Movie Ending
The ending of The Mirror is a sublime convergence of all its timelines. The film flows into its final sequence, which takes us back to the idyllic countryside of Alexei’s childhood. We see his elderly mother, now looking frail, walking with the young children. However, the camera then glides through the trees and tall grass to reveal the young, pregnant Maria lying on the ground. She looks towards her husband, Alexei’s father, who is smoking nearby. This is a moment before Alexei’s birth, a pre-memory.
Ultimately, the ending signifies a return to the origin. It is a moment of peace before the separation and suffering that will define the family’s life. By concluding with an image of his parents together and in love, the dying Alexei finds a form of spiritual resolution. The fractured self, scattered across time, is finally made whole at its source. It is not an ending of plot, but one of poetic and emotional closure.
Are There Post-Credits Scenes?
No, there are no post-credits scenes in The Mirror. The film concludes definitively once the credits begin.
Type of Movie
The Mirror is best described as a poetic autobiography and a landmark of art-house cinema. It defiantly rejects conventional genre classification. Its tone is overwhelmingly introspective, melancholy, and dreamlike. The film operates on a logic of emotion and association rather than cause and effect, asking the audience to feel the narrative instead of simply following it.
Cast
- Margarita Terekhova – Maria (The Mother) / Natalia (The Wife)
- Ignat Daniltsev – Ignat / Young Alexei
- Oleg Yankovsky – The Father
- Alla Demidova – Liza
- Larisa Tarkovskaya – Nadezhda
- Anatoly Solonitsyn – Pedestrian Doctor
- Maria Tarkovskaya – The Mother (as an old woman)
- Arseny Tarkovsky – The Narrator (voice)
Film Music and Composer
The score was composed by Eduard Artemyev, a frequent collaborator with Andrei Tarkovsky and a pioneer of electronic music in the Soviet Union. His atmospheric, synthesized soundscapes create a haunting, otherworldly feel. However, Artemyev’s score is brilliantly juxtaposed with classical pieces. Notably, music from Johann Sebastian Bach (especially from the St. John Passion), Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, and Henry Purcell anchors the film’s spiritual and timeless qualities, providing a powerful contrast to the deeply personal and temporal nature of memory.
Filming Locations
The film was shot primarily in and around Moscow and at a dacha in Tutshkovo. The country house location was deeply significant for the director. In fact, it was built near the site of Tarkovsky’s own childhood home. This choice allowed him to reconstruct his past with painstaking detail, imbuing the physical space with authentic personal history. Consequently, the dacha in the film becomes more than a set; it is a tangible piece of the director’s memory, representing a lost Eden.
Awards and Nominations
Due to its unconventional style and personal nature, The Mirror was met with hostility from the Soviet film committee, Goskino. As a result, it was given a limited release and was not submitted by the state for major international festivals like Cannes or Venice. Despite this, the film has since gained immense critical acclaim and is now universally regarded as a masterpiece. While it has no major contemporary awards to its name, its reward is its enduring status among filmmakers and critics as one of the greatest films ever made.
Behind the Scenes Insights
- The film’s screenplay, originally titled A White, White Day after a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky, underwent over twenty different versions as the director grappled with how to structure his memories.
- Tarkovsky was so committed to authenticity that he cast his own mother, Maria Vishnyakova, to appear as the elderly mother in the film.
- The director’s wife, Larisa Tarkovskaya, also appears in the film as Nadezhda, the wealthy doctor’s wife.
- Many on the crew reportedly found the non-linear script baffling. The cinematographer, Georgi Rerberg, and Tarkovsky apparently had major creative disagreements about how to visually represent the abstract concepts.
- Soviet authorities were deeply troubled by the film’s perceived elitism, ambiguity, and lack of a clear propagandistic message. They relegated it to a “third category” release, meaning very few copies were distributed.
Inspirations and References
The foremost inspiration for The Mirror is Andrei Tarkovsky’s own life. The film is a direct, unfiltered translation of his memories, anxieties, and feelings about his family. The voice of his actual father, poet Arseny Tarkovsky, reciting his own work, is the film’s artistic and thematic bedrock. Beyond autobiography, the film engages with the philosophical concepts of time and memory explored by thinkers like Marcel Proust. Visually, it is also indebted to the portraiture of the Old Masters, with many compositions resembling classical paintings.
Alternate Endings and Deleted Scenes
There are no known alternate endings for The Mirror in the traditional sense. Tarkovsky’s vision for the ending was singular. However, the film was the subject of intense battles with the Soviet censors at Goskino, who demanded numerous cuts. Tarkovsky fought tenaciously to preserve his film, and the final version is remarkably close to his intended cut. The “deleted scenes” exist more as a record of the director’s struggle against a bureaucratic system that could not comprehend his intensely personal art.
Book Adaptations and Differences
The Mirror is not an adaptation of any book. It is a wholly original work, with a screenplay written by Tarkovsky and his collaborator, Aleksandr Misharin. The film’s narrative is built directly from the director’s life, making it one of the most personal and autobiographical films ever created.
Memorable Scenes and Quotes
Key Scenes
- The Stuttering Boy: The film opens with a televised clip of a therapist curing a teenage boy of a severe stutter through hypnosis, ending with the boy declaring clearly, “I can speak.” This sets the stage for the narrator’s own struggle to articulate his past.
- The Levitation: In a dreamlike memory, Alexei’s mother Maria washes her hair. Afterwards, as she lies on a bed, she and the bed slowly levitate, a sublime visual metaphor for the transcendent power of memory and maternal love.
- The Burning Barn: The family watches with detached stillness as their wet, wooden barn is consumed by flames on a rainy day. This surreal, beautiful image captures a sense of inevitable loss.
- The Printing Press Error: A flashback shows Maria in a panic at her job at a printing press, fearing she let a typo slip into an article about Stalin. The scene is a masterclass in building psychological tension and shows the constant anxiety of life under authoritarianism.
Iconic Quotes
- “Words can’t express what you mean to me. And if they could, I wouldn’t use them.”
- “At last I have you, my unruly river. Flow on, flow on through your clay banks, and gnaw them, and be merry.”
- “Childhood is the most important thing in life. It is the most influential time in a person’s life. It is the place where one’s future is shaped.”
- “And you have dreams at night? I don’t. It’s only the unhappy who have dreams.”
Easter Eggs and Hidden Details
- The Dual Casting: The most significant detail is Margarita Terekhova playing both the mother and the ex-wife. This masterstroke visualizes the narrator’s psychological pattern of seeking his mother’s image in his romantic partner.
- The Collapsed Generations: Similarly, actor Ignat Daniltsev plays both Alexei as a boy and Alexei’s son, Ignat. This collapses time and identity, suggesting that sons are doomed to repeat or reflect their fathers’ lives.
- Recurring Motifs: Pay close attention to recurring elements like wind blowing through grass, spilled milk, and reflections in water and mirrors. Each one is a symbolic key to the film’s emotional landscape.
- Leonardo da Vinci Poster: A poster of Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci is seen in one scene. Tarkovsky was deeply influenced by Renaissance art and saw a connection between the portrait and the mysterious nature of his characters.
Trivia
- The working title of the film, Confession, was rejected for being too provocative to Soviet authorities. It was then changed to A White, White Day before Tarkovsky settled on The Mirror.
- Famed director Sergei Bondarchuk publicly condemned the film, calling it self-indulgent. On the other hand, many audience members in the Soviet Union wrote passionate letters to Tarkovsky, thanking him for putting their own feelings and memories on screen.
- Tarkovsky hypnotic-style directing led to some strange occurrences, including an unscripted moment where a bird landed on the head of young actor Ignat Daniltsev, which Tarkovsky decided to keep in the film.
Why Watch?
Embark on a cinematic journey that feels like a lucid dream. While challenging, this film offers a deeply moving exploration of family, memory, and time itself. For those who view cinema as a high art form, this visually stunning masterpiece is absolutely essential.
Director’s Other Movies
- Ivan’s Childhood (1962)
- Andrei Rublev (1966)
- Solaris (1972)
- Stalker (1979)
- Nostalghia (1983)
- The Sacrifice (1986)
Recommended Films for Fans
- The Tree of Life (2011)
- Roma (2018)
- The Color of Pomegranates (1969)
- Persona (1966)
