The Mirror (1975) on Netflix
Aleksei, a poet in his forties, is dying and turns over his memories: his mother Maria, his childhood, the war years, his former wife Natalia and their son Ignat.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.9/1058,497 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Aleksei is a Soviet poet who lies dying in his forties. He remembers himself as a child, as an adolescent, and as a grown man. Before the war his mother Maria lives in a country dacha with her children, and a doctor passing by remarks that her husband has left her. Her barn burns down and the family can only watch. In the present Aleksei is troubled by a strange illness and by thoughts of his father, and argues on the phone with Maria. He quarrels with Natalia, his former wife, who has their son Ignat with her.
Cast
- Larisa Tarkovskayaas Nadezha - Mother of twelve-year-old Alexei
Show all 20 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Mirror (1975)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Tarkovsky shot Mirror without a fixed structure and rewrote much of the script as he went; down to 400 metres of film, he recast Margarita Terekhova, until then only Aleksei's mother, as Aleksei's wife.
- After Tarkovsky finished the film in July 1974, Ermash rejected it as incomprehensible, infuriating Tarkovsky so much that he toyed with making a film outside the Soviet Union; Goskino ultimately approved Mirror without any changes in fall 1974.
- Allowed only one submission a year at Cannes, the Soviet government sent Sergei Bondarchuk's They Fought for Their Country instead of Mirror to the 1975 festival; festival managing director Maurice Bessy threatened to ban the Bondarchuk film in response.
- A scene cut during shooting, in which Tarkovsky planned to film his own mother with a hidden camera under the pretext of research, was one of the main reasons his longtime cameraman Vadim Yusov refused to work on the film.
- Tarkovsky first considered Alla Demidova and Swedish actress Bibi Andersson for the role of Aleksei's mother before choosing Margarita Terekhova.
- Mirror draws heavily on Tarkovsky's childhood, including the wartime evacuation from Moscow to the countryside, a father who left the family and returned only after the war, and his mother's job as a proofreader at a state-owned printing press; both parents appear in the film.
- According to Tarkovsky's sister Marina, he named the film Mirror because he "understood that he had followed in the footsteps of our father, who had also divorced our mother"; she said it also reflects his guilt over divorcing his first wife, Irma Raush.
