The Force of Memory
'The Mirror' is Tarkovsky's autobiographical masterpiece about which there is both little and a lot to say. As all his work, seeing this movie is something one must experience as it is such a different kind of cinema as that of any other director. Not a movie for those with a short attention span one could argue that The Mirror is about the overwhelming power that memories can have on our lives. As stated the movie more or less is autobiographic as we see Tarkovsky's childhood years in the country, to which many Russians fled from WWII, brought there by his mother. His father, the famous Russian poet Arsenii Tarkovsky is not present, except through citations from his poetry by means of a voice over, while we look at beautiful Russian scenery or archive images of soldiers walking through swamps. Apart from a visual feast the movie also offers an auditorial banquet not only of recited poems but also wonderful music, which plays a crucial part (as always in Tarkovsky's movies).
The story timeline of the movie at first viewing may prove to be somewhat confusing, as there is continuous interplay between past and present. In the present time of the movie the main character is a divorced man, obviously an intellectual, who both spiritually as well as emotionally is in a crisis. In this state he has a series of childhood recollections and the movie throws in an extra free of charge bit of 20th century Russian history into the mix. It is shown how he grew up in the country, how Spanish civil war survivors fled to Russia, how he was military trained in Leningrad as a boy during WWII and got to know his first love, how his mother lived in a printing shop under Stalin's censorship, Soviet-Chinese border tensions after the Chinese revolution etc.
Confusing in all this is that his mother in the flashbacks is played by the same actress as the main protagonist's current ex-wife, even though he says as much in a phonecall with his ex that when he has childhood recollections of his mother she always looks like his ex. The story itself is pretty simple, but it's complex through the way it is structured, especially the first time one sees the movie, but this is true for any Tarkovsky movie. Each movie should be watched at least three times to get any kind of understanding of what they are about, which however doesn't mean one can't immensely enjoy them first time around. What worked for me on first viewings was not over analyzing too much and simply let the movie take me along, the perfect acting, the beauty of the images, the musical splendor and magnificent poetry.
This was the first Tarkovsky movie I ever saw a long time ago and it changed the way I looked at art in general and cinema in particular.
It's my sincere wish to any Tarkovsky 'newbie' to have a similar wonderful experience.
The one star missing in my judgment is due to the rather bad visual quality of this release, which is quite a shame and, as a Russian friend assured me, quite bad translation. (Luckily Moskwood did a better job on both counts.)

IF YOU LIKE THIS POEM, THIS MOVIE'S FOR YOU, OR YOU HAVE A BRAIN TUMOR
'A man has one body/so solitary/The soul is sick/of this solid sheath.../with eyes and ears the size of buttons.../and skin, a mass of scars,/a skeleton's robe' ... And on and on for 30 lines of VO commentary over cryptic visuals of obtuse behavior which relate not in any way I can see with the other dour, jumbled, drumming elements of this pastiche of words and pictures that have no meaning or connection.

This is not an entertaining film. Nor edifying or interesting. Other reviews have said, like it's a good thing, that audiences were churned and divided. Must be true. And frustrated and confused and wishing the jumble of meaningless scenes faded quickly.

I have other AT films, like Solaris and Stalker. Each much better than this whatever it is. The case cover says 'Extraordinarily Beautiful'; not so. Also it says 'Haunting masterpiece'; half-right, haunting it is, but not in a good way. Save your rubles for vodka.

Don't Get Bogged Down with the Technical Issues, Just Watch It.
I know there are websites devoted to comparing different transfers of Tarkovsky's movies. The age-old Kino vs. R.U.S.C.I.C.O.. They both have their pluses and minuses. There is first, the difference in color. Kino (this edition) is more saturated, but the audio track has a tin-can reverb to it, delaying it almost to the point where the music doesn't match. And then there is the matter of translation.

I consider myself a huge fan of Andrei Tarkovski's work. I own both versions, and had to obtain it long before Amazon even carried it. (They are the same editions though). I am reminded of an old scratchy King Pleasure record I own. It's been played for so many years, you could hear every scratch, pop, and click on it. But it doesn't take away the least bit from the enjoyment. Why? Because IT IS THE QUALITY OF THE WORK THAT COUNTS, not the quality of the media.

I have seen this movie on the big screen at Lincoln Center in New York City recently, carefully restored with corrected translation. I came home and watched both my copies the next day to compare. In my opinion, as a non-Russian speaker (but a graduated English major), the minor discrepancies and lack of transfer DOES NOT outweigh the fantastic quality of film-making presented here.

Tarkovsky is one of the recent Russian film greats, and this movie is seen by many as the apex of his creativity. Last time I checked, film is more than mere images. It is audio, visual, script, angles, color combined to tell a story. You have Tarkovsky's father (the acclaimed Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky) reciting his stately poems in his rich voice over long continuous shots detailing the director's childhood memory in the countryside, when his father went off to fight the war.

Created scenes intersect with historical footage to present a fugal magnum opus onscreen. Tarkovsky studied Arabic in the university, and he had a love of J.S. Bach's music (which is present here along with Purcell's works and Eduard Artemyev) which means he has an appreciation from Zakhrafa art and labyrinthian schemes. For those who may not be familiar with Bach's compositions, three or four melodies interweave with each other to create a *fugue*, which uses sound to play off each other in a device called counterpoint. Tarkovsky recreates this structure visually, where time is nonlinear, and each actor plays several characters, switching between present and past.

This is Tarkovsky's way of presenting our persona as a composite of all our experiences and memory.

Do yourself a favor. Don't wait for the right version. This movie is strong enough to pull through all the scratches, pops, hiss, clicks, and color discrepancies.

KINO or RUSCICO?
This is a case where there can be no argument whatsoever: Ruscico's "Zerkalo" wins hands-down. The image is far superior, the audio is vastly superior (so clear that things can be heard whose existence would not even be suspected on the Kino disk), and the subtitles are more extensive and clearer.

Allow me to mention: The audio I refer to on Ruscico's disk is the original mono; the drastically-modified 5.1 mix is an abomnation. (It proves, however, that there are no such things as ghosts -- if there were, Andrei's would bedevil the guy that did the 5.1 remix till the end of his life.) From what I've read, not all editions of the Ruscico DVD include the mono track, so beware! On the subject of subtitles, I have to say that I far prefer Russian-written English subs to English-written English subs any day. The Russian-written subs may be ungrammatical and contain Russian idioms you may not catch, but they are far subtler and clearer (and usually more extensive) than any written by a native English-speaker.

An interesting additional tidbit on the Ruscico disk: Check the photo gallery to see how Andrei achieved the lovely wind effect at the end of the scene between Margareta Terekhova and Anatoly Solonitsyn.

Watching Ruscico's "Zerkalo" is like watching a different movie.

A mirror on memory
No other film conjures the landscapes of memory the same way, and no other is so unforgettable. To recount things like a fantastic cast or a riveting camera-work feels trivial--these are givens when dealing with Tarkovsky. The magic lies elsewhere. Tarkovsky called his film-making sculpting in time and this phrase suits The Mirror perfectly. The richness of its imagery is reminiscent of that other great sculptor in time--Marcel Proust. Watching The Mirror feels very different from reading Proust, but Tarkovsky has that unparalleled understanding of memory that Proust has in literature. The film is not surreal or strange or difficult to watch; to the contrary, it feels bewitchingly light and liquid. It does not look as a dream or a flashback, but memories never do--although they are often represented as such on the silver screen. And yet Tarkovsky's luxurious pacing and exquisite framing are also dream-like in their haunting beauty and power of absorption. In The Mirror, as in The Remembrance of Things Past, memories are not representations of reality; they are reality. Watching the film feels as if someone caught your memory in a mirror and reflected it back. What you see is at once both personal and social--a view into your innermost emotions as well as their historical fabric. Its realism lies not in the specific events it portrays but in the structure of feeling it captures. Every Tarkovsky film has left me somewhere between a shock and a trance, totally dumbfounded that a film can be like this, and none more than The Mirror. This is film as poetry.