So this is a film by Andrei Tarkovsky, the guy who did the famous Soviet version of Solaris that’s supposed to be long and incomprehensible. This movie is not that long (1:40), but holy shit is it incomprehensible.

Seriously, go read the paragraph-long synopsis on Wikipedia.

Did you read it? That is describing a sequence of random incidents taking place in three time periods, right, and none of them lead into any other in ways related to story or character, it’s just disconnected vignettes (Pete refers to the film’s modernist “stream of consciousness” structure, which: yep.) To really appreciate this, though, you need to know that in each of the different timeframes, the same actors/actresses play different characters, so if you see the woman in the picture attached to this post, it might be the grown narrator’s ex-wife or it might be the young narrator’s mother. They don’t even do her hair different to distinguish between them.

Oh, and it switches between color and black-and-white, but for no reason. It’s not like the present is color and the past is B&W or anything, it’s just basically random. Also by the way, the narrator regularly reads poetry written by the director’s dad over these scenes.

The most I’ve been able to get out of reading about this movie is that you’re supposed to just sort of let it wash over you as an impressionistic thing, and treat it as a kind of dream-logic nostalgic reverie sort of thing (it is apparently more than semi-autobiographical about the director’s life growing up in mid-century Russia), and not try to make sense of it as such. Which, okay, that’s fine. I can do that.

But I’m not gonna love it. Meh.