Andrei Tarkovsky is one of those film-makers you’re supposed to love if you want to be serious about cinema. He takes a bit of work -but that is, of course, true of many worthwhile things.
I remember thinking there was something wrong with me when I found ‘The Sacrifice’ boring – but, in an example of a habit I to which, alas, I have devoted much of my time, I just didn’t get it. I was not as ready as my genial co-host for Russian existentialist/religious cinema. But by the time I made it to ‘Solaris’ I had already seen the Soderbergh-Clooney version; their more linear version prepared me to experience the original without spending the duration in utter confusion. It’s an astonishing film, in which a man discovers the meaning of life by making peace with his own death.
This story is, of course, not new; indeed it needs to be told over and over, for much the same reason as Wendell Berry suggests that the story of the making of faith (between humans and each other, between ourselves and ourselves, between people and God, whatever they perceive God to be) needs to be told and re-told, because the breaking of faith is so often in danger of being the story of our time.
Not, perhaps, on a day like today. But moments like the inauguration of rhetoric like ‘your people will judge you on what you build, not what you destroy’ are fleeting; it’s what happens tomorrow that matters. And all of which of my own rhetoric is apropos of something simple: the Sundance Institute, whose festival, which in spite of everything else that’s going on in the world today, continues in Utah, has helped a Japanese director tell this story again, and in such a way that may have made Tarkovsky proud.
‘The Clone Returns Home’ is a science fiction film in which Buddhism meets genetic advances; a guy gets cloned and then confused and then enlightened. It’s quite amazing. Wim Wenders is executive producer – another Sundance characteristic; Wenders was on the jury that awarded a prize to the un-filmed screenplay a couple of years ago; the writer-director Kanji Nakajima triumphantly returned with the completed work to the festival this week. Sundance does try to nurture new work, and it’s lovely to see it when itappears fully formed. While you probably benefit from knowing a bit of Tarkovsky before seeing this, it doesn’t really matter – the experience of watching is sensory as much as philosophical. Of course, Tarkovsky was self-consciously Christian; and Kanji Nakajima is not – but the allusions between Christianity and Buddhism have rarely seemed more obvious than in this film, which features one of the most striking images I’ve ever seen: a man carries the simulacrum of his own body, a technically real but soulless shadow of himself; he dies from tiredness, and the shadow picks him up, holding the weight of a disintegrating life. And the clone returns home.
Gareth – have really enjoyed your postings from Sundance. Thanks for sharing some of these films.
Gareth – have really enjoyed your postings from Sundance. Thanks for sharing some of these films.