Andrei & Ivan

Drip. Drip. Drip…

The camera zooms in. To the shivering horror. Ivan’s face is grimy, with eyes that have lost their sense of time, ordering the Sergeant to inform HQ that he has crossed the line.

And all the time, like a recurring sound motif, the dripping water assaults the viewer’s senses. Grating at our understanding of War. Challenging us to stay aware. In the end, it is the water that leads Ivan back to his territory and death. No military school for him. Just a leaf’s existence behind Nazi lines, scout to Russia’s resistance.

Sun and sand dissolve into bleak montages of tepid rivers, a bell is used to pound our attention to the still-born angst of Ivan’s Childhood, as Andrei Arsenevich Tarkovsky weaves his camera between light and dark, shadow and sound, close-ups and profile shots to create magic in the movie that made the world sit up and take notice of the poetic film-maker par excellence.

Set in the tumultuous times of the Second World War, as the Nazis are gaining on the Motherland, as families such as Ivan’s are getting shot, as villages are being burnt to rubble, the film is war at its hurting best. Especially because it is seen through the eyes of the 12-year-old Ivan and his army protectors, who take turns to push him away from the front, into school. But school is not for Vanya, who has crossed the dreaded river, swimming into friendly zone to alert his handlers of Nazi positions across the line — using berries, roots, stones and twigs to determine columns and garrisons. And go back, he insists he must, to save other families such as his. That is his destiny. That is the end of him. He resurfaces only as a statistic post the war. Hung to death, we are told by the victorious soldier sifting through the scattered documents.

This is Tarkovsky striking at the root of all human conflicts, his narrative punching holes into every argument for war and its glorification. What a contrast to say, mainstream Hollywood fare like Saving Private Ryan.

This 1962 film was Tarkovsky’s first feature length film and the viewer gets a glimpse of what is to come in his later works, works that are visually brilliant and shorn of random symbology.

Like the surrealistic Solaris. Tarkovsky’s sublime interpretation of humanity’s struggle to retain its humanism in a world that deifies science and its achievements. How the director manages to marry two of mankind’s essential concerns in a sci-fi story that, by itself, is capable of asking some of the most troubling questions of our time, is where his brilliance lies. And why he is widely regarded as one of the most poetic film-makers of the last century. Adapted from Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction novel by the same name, it is probably Tarkovsky’s most visually enthralling film with its magnificent wide-angle outdoor shots, juxtaposed with shots of the confined spaces that make up the space station where most of the action takes place.

Beginning with a breathtaking shot of a leaf coursing through a rivulet in utter silence, and taking us on a journey from the nature that we see to the alien nature that we can only experience as manifestations of our own deepest longings, Tarkovsky’s camera pans, pirouettes and literally gobbles up the screen like a Shakespearean monologue. Till we are yanked into the minds of the scientists who have come to face their own fears that the planet throws up — one of them commits suicide, two are near schizophrenic, and the protagonist, psychologist Kris Kelvin, falls in love all over again with his long-dead wife, resurrected by the Entity.

It is a movie that defies categorization into any genre, although it is part sci-fi, consuming our thirst for understanding the human capacity to love in a canvas so vast that two hours and 49 minutes just dissolve into the mist of the froth bubble that is the planet core. For every one who wants to delve into Tarkovsky’s film-maker mind, this is a must-see. And for comparison, try and catch Hollywood’s take on Solaris, directed by Steven Soderbergh and featuring George Clooney in the lead role, on cable.

Tarkovsky’s kitty includes such gems as Andrei Rublev, Stalker, The Mirror and Nostalgia, shot in Italy, where he spent his last years escaping Soviet harassment.