It’s no use being dishonest about it. I had to grow up to appreciate this film. The second confession is that my newfound appreciation of the film as a whole, as with so many other films, is selfishly based on my personal identification with Alexander, the central character. The third might be that when I first saw The Sacrifice, I just didn’t now how to watch a film anyway. The photography and the lighting, the cinematography if you will, went over my head like a fighter jet. It was lost on me so sitting through a nearly 3 hour movie with no real action? Please… My immaturity well into my twenties and thirties is best explained by how quickly I took to music videos. It was never really about the film or anything in the film, writing, direction acting etc. It’s always been about me. There was no telling a good film from a bad film. That is of course until I evolved as a human being, but even now it’s largely about personal identification, more than empathy with a character who may not be like me. That’s growing also though, as my empathy in the world grows.
So all that bullshit aside, The Sacrifice is a fucking flawless, gorgeous film. It’s second among my Tarkovsky favorites, which in order are:
Stalker
The Sacrifice
Solaris
Andrei Rublev
There’s something that runs across all of them that only came to me last night. There is a pervading earthiness (even in Solaris) throughout all his films. Decay, destruction, rot, all racing toward entropy. There is always an ongoing battle, in all the settings, between industry/science and nature, between inorganic and organic, between the corruption of man and the Earth itself. Alexander himself talks about it in one of his ongoing monologues in The Sacrifice, but it is at the end of the movie I think that you get the total picture. It all begins with talk of atheism and Nietzsche, travels through Medieval and Renaissance religious art, then to fevered prayer, on into pagan sex ritual, and then into religious sacrifice. All the battles in the settings are between man and God.
And then, because it’s always about me anyway, all this shit that I carry on about, it recalls for me my own struggles with faith. I am religious in desperation and will fall to my knees crying to the Heavens, and when everything is better I am an avowed atheist. Or perhaps an agnostic.
An agnostic with guilt, and an agnostic living in the knowledge that I will be back on my knees in the mud, and begging forgiveness again when things are on a downward spiral.
But, as Alexander and Little Man say in the film, “In the beginning there was The Word.” It always starts right there. It always ends there. What goes on in between is usually chaos and discord.
Anyway you twist it though, this is a remarkably gorgeous piece of work. I regret never having seen it on a big screen and will have to watch out for it making an appearance at any of the arthouses.
Further random thoughts:
Alexander was willing to sacrifice everything, including his precious child for an end to the pending nuclear war. He prays for everyone at first. For his child, his family, his friends and all the people of the world and promises he would give up everything. By the end of the prayer he’s broken down to admission that he is really begging for release from his own terror.
There was an earlier allusion that he had quit his acting career in sacrifice to some greater truth. He sacrificed fame because he found he was losing himself in his characters. His wife alluded to the fact that she had sacrificed her glamorous life to come stay with him out of some sense of obligation. She later confesses that she loved one man (presumably Viktor) but married another. Again, sacrifice.
Working back from the end of the film, Otto the Postman had sacrificed one of his great treasures (the ancient map of Europe) because “every real gift should be a sacrifice.”
And right to the beginning, Alexander is telling Little Man about the years of sacrifice a young monk made to tending a dead tree, which only bore leaves after three years of hauling water out to care for it.
The entire film… sacrifice, dedication, promises, man vs. nature and man vs. God.
What rough beast 