Mother and Son

Star Review

A sublime film of almost overwhelming tenderness, Mother and Son takes place on a level of intimacy rarely achieved in film. A mother and her son live in isolation in the countryside; the mother is dying and her son cares for her; their world is one of shared thoughts, shared space and even shared dreams. Though the mother is incapacitated, she says that she wants to go for a walk, so the son picks her up and, to the sound of thunder and the shrieking of swifts, carries her through a landscape distorted into dreamlike intensity that looks as if it exists entirely through their perception.

The film’s unique look was partly derived from recreating the atmosphere of Caspar David Friedrich canvases, and was achieved by filming through refractive, painted planes of glass and anamorphic lenses. It is a film out of time, in which even the piano music heard over the opening credits sounds like a memory. Its soundtrack is one of breath and thunder, of whispered words, of the wind through trees and the crackle of fire.

Graeme Hobbs on 13th June 2007

View all 230 of Graeme Hobbs’s reviews

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Film Description

Words almost fail to describe this unique film in which a son carries his dying mother through an isolated landscape that has been distorted into an almost hallucinatory intensity. The tenderness, love, honesty and pain is overwhelming. This is the film that prompted Martin Scorsese to say, 'Why can't America make cinema like this?'

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DVD Extras

• A Humble Life (Sokurov, 1997)
• Alexander Sokurov biography.

Film Details

Cast

Gudrun Geyer, Alexei Ananishnov

Technical Details