Mother and Son is a love story about the deep affection which exists
between a mother and her son. She is seriously ill, her body is feeble,
her energy drained. The son nurses her lovingly. He feeds her, sits her
out on a bench in front of the house, and reads postcards aloud to her.
They remember the time when he was a child and she could not let him out
of her sight, being scared that she might lose him. The mother tries to
hide from her son her approaching death. She asks to go for a stroll,
wanting to be among people - even though she can't walk. Her son carries
her through the empty village; a deserted place in which they are the last
inhabitants. The landscape in which the mother and son live has a sad
beauty to it, its images having more similarity with the paintings of
Caspar David Friedrich than those of the glossy superficialities of many
films. Only twice does the exterior world appear on the horizon, like a
clue that other people do exist and in the form of a locomotive's smoke
trail - which only the son sees, gazing at it longingly. When his mother
dies, the son is left entirely alone, remaining in a world which can offer
him no comfort.
Alexandr Sokurov was born in Irkutsk (Russia) in 1951. He
studied History and trained until 1979 as a director at the Moscow Film
School VGIK. His graduation film The Lonely Voice of Man (Odinokij golos
cheloveka, 1978-87) was neither officially accepted by the school, nor
given the right to be shown. This was the same for all of his films. They
were only shown from 1986 following intervention by the exiled Tarkovsky
on his behalf. To date, Sokurov has made 30 documentary and feature films
and won numerous prizes. His films include: Days Of Eclipse (Dni Zatmeniya, 1988), Stone
(Kamen', 1992), Whispering Pages (Tichie Stranitsui, 1993) and Mother And Son (Mat' I
Syn, 1997).
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