Director Alexander Sokurov turns life into art, and back again. He has control I haven't seen exercised so relentlessly over actors since Carl Dreyer was alive. Will it move you? I'm not sure. But you will marvel at a film so far out of our time. The story is about a young man and his dying mother who spend their remaining days together in a house in a forest close to the coast.
Mother And Son is an amazingly delicate, barely hour-long evocation of final words and last gasps, full of sequences – ravishing landscapes, death bed pietas – that strive for the quality of portraiture; remarkable as it is, it belongs to that school of cinema that wants to be something else entirely, an aspiration that will strike some viewers as either admirable or antithetical. Alexei Fyodorov's cinematography is incredible, and combined with Vladimir Persov and Martin Steyer's impeccable sound design creates a visual and aural landscape of the soul that is unforgettable.
Mother And Son is an amazingly delicate, barely hour-long evocation of final words and last gasps, full of sequences – ravishing landscapes, death bed pietas – that strive for the quality of portraiture; remarkable as it is, it belongs to that school of cinema that wants to be something else entirely, an aspiration that will strike some viewers as either admirable or antithetical. Alexei Fyodorov's cinematography is incredible, and combined with Vladimir Persov and Martin Steyer's impeccable sound design creates a visual and aural landscape of the soul that is unforgettable.