As I watched Mirror, I was constantly trying to figure out what time it was, the narrator's present or past. To me, the film began with a wife waiting patiently for her husband to return from the war; I got this feeling that he had already been killed. She apparently had children, but I didn't quite understand why the daughter's head was shaved. These same children appear at the end of the film with whom I think is the aged mother; I guessed that the mother was now plagued with some mental disease and that these kids were hallucinations. I know that the narrator was the son of the woman, seen in the beginning of the film, but where is the daughter?
As the movie continues to unfold, these poems appear during different scenes; the words seem so eerie and depressing, one of which I can sort of remember: "Like an insane man with a knife in his hand"(something along those lines). I also noticed how it was always raining or there was some appearance of liquid, for example, the milk dripping in the doctor's home or the soldiers marching in the muck.
When the film reveals that the narrator is much older and has a son, I remember him telling his ex-wife that she reminds him of his mother. Right from that point, I couldn't tell if at one moment it was the ex-wife or if it was the mother; it seemed to be always switching. This is also true with the son as the story jumped back to the narrator's memory with the gun scene. I noticed that the son had a mole right by his upper lip so that when I saw the scene from the narrator's memory, I got really confused in who I was looking at: young narrator or son?
As I tried so hard to follow this film, my brain could not connect all these short events that would appear on screen. One minute I'm watching a bull fight (Spain), next minute I'm seeing Chinese mobs pointing at these books that had no meaning to me. This brings to mind the scene in which the mother is running to what appears to be her job as an editor? She needs to see the proof of a particular day's paper (I can't remember which) and seems anxious to discover if something is there. I really wanted to know what that something was!
Overall, I was thrown into this strange unique film that even when it was over, makes no sense whatsoever to me. Some of the weirdest scenes are still stuck in my head, for instance, when the mother kills the rooster, the grenade scene, as well as the beginning dream of the child who sees his mother with wet hair dangling over her face and walking oh so eerily around the home that seems to be falling apart before your eyes. Creepy.
4 comments:
One of the scenes that most struck me when I first saw the film was where Alyosha is sitting and looking at the mirror while his mother is selling her earrings to the wealthy woman. The extended shot of him looking up at the mirror (and then the one that switches so that we are looking back down on him from the mirror) strikes me as so sublimely beautiful--and with the Henry Purcell music playing!--that I almost hesitate to try and put into words what I experience every time I encounter it. Let me just say that I think it perfectly captures an adolescent confronting himself in all of his awkwardness (as in, "when will I ever grow up--will I always be this homely!"). This is compounded by the fact he is being made to wait in that room for a seemingly endless amount of time.
The little girl with the shaved head really confused me too. I actually didn't even realize that it was a girl until the end of the movie. Lol.
Oh my gosh! I wanted to know what was with that proof too!! The two women had that "moment" of an understanding, and I was like "was it a bad word? an innuendo? what!?!"
Then I got confused when the other lady started laying into the mother...
Mirror is indeed a unique movie thats keeps the viewer fascinated. Many different elements of the movie, including the girl with the shaved head, adds twist after twist to the story.
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