Aleksandr Sokurov/Russia/Germany/2003; R4
Warner Bros/Rialto, NZ$24.95 | Reviewed by Mubarak Ali

LIKE Sokurov's earlier abstracted parent-and-child film, Mother and Son, a troubling dream opens Father and Son, the second in a planned trilogy on family relationships that allude to the grander scheme of things: through Sokurov's distorting lens, we can make out the sculpted figure of the Father, consoling his disturbed Son in a highly intimate embrace. The scene is one which immediately throws viewers in the film's deliberately blurred state-of-mind, and one that establishes the omnipresence of sensuality in the film.

Soon, it comes as a surprise that there may be a narrative emerging – the son is a young soldier who is eager to follow in his war-veteran father's footsteps, both extremely possessive of each other, and their relationship is gently stretched when another young man appears, searching for his missing father. Make no mistake, however, as this is a Sokurov film and as it progresses, any narrative that may have arose over the course of the first few minutes is slowly dissolved with its elliptical conversations on the nature of the father-son relationship (religious undertones are never far away, as the son proclaims to his estranged, jealous girlfriend: "A father's love crucifies...a loving son let's himself be crucified"), and the residue is a frequently dreamlike series of episodes which hovers somewhere between the calibrated intimacy of Mother and Son, and the reverent male physicality of Beau travail – while never exactly reaching the sensuous/sensual heights of either of those films. (Armond White, by the way, summarises the ambiguous male-male associations quite well: "Political, familial, erotic, philosophical, cosmic, satirical, holy. Often all at the same time".)

The film is bathed in a warm, orange glow which seems to create the mirage-like effect of merging flesh to flesh, such that one cannot be told apart from the other (especially in those tight close-ups), which may invite/has invited the further interpretation that both father and son are actually one persona in search of an equilibrium between past and present, self and other, but I'd rather wade through the film's visual and aural (Tchaikovsky, meet electronic music!) textures than try to limit its allusory mise-en-scene, which is itself searching for a definition in the middle of a dream.


APART from a brief image gallery, the DVD is featureless. The picture is presented in a clear 1.43:1 transfer; the sound as a plain 2.0 audio track. Russian language with embedded english subtitles.