| Director | Andrei Tarkovsky, Jesús Franco |
|---|---|
| Budget | SUR 622,000 |
| Box office | $124,367 |
Mirror depicts the thoughts, emotions and memories of Aleksei, a Soviet poet, as a child, adolescent, and 40-year-old. The film freely switches between three different timeframes: prewar (c. 1935), World War II (1940s), and postwar (1960s or '70s). The drama is entirely shown from Aleksei's perspective; the adult Aleksei's face is never shown, and his body only briefly glimpsed. Tarkovsky said that because a memory reveals "what [a person] thinks, how he thinks, and what he thinks about", a film collecting a man's memories "build[s] up a graphic and clearly-defined picture of him" without needing to show the man himself. To represent the real-life experience of a man going over old memories, the film's structure is discontinuous and nonchronological, lacks a conventional plot, and combines incidents, dreams, memories, newsreel footage, and Arseny Tarkovsky's poems in voiceover. Scenes are connected not by time or place, but by particular individuals and motifs that serendipitously come to mind, such as a book that Aleksei once read during an important moment, or a background character mentioned during a phone call.
The film encourages viewers to embrace its nonlinear, seemingly illogical narrative by including an opening scene in which a woman in a lab coat performs hypnosis on a young man, apparently curing his severe stutter.
Before the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), Aleksei's mother, Maria, lives with her children in a plain countryside dacha. A passing doctor notes that Maria's husband has left her. Before leaving, the doctor mysteriously rambles about how modern Russians do not "trust the nature that is inside us". Maria stares out the window and silently cries while Tarkovsky's father recites his poems in voiceover. Her barn burns down. The family stare at the flames, powerless to stop them.
In a dream sequence (presented in black and white), young Aleksei sneaks out of bed to see his father helping his mother wash her hair. Water begins to pour down the walls, dissolving the ceiling. His mother looks in a mirror and sees a vision of herself as a proud, old woman.
In the present day (1960s/70s), after the war, the adult Aleksei is afflicted by a mysterious malady and haunted by memories of his father. He has a testy phone call with his mother, with whom he frequently quarrels. She hangs up on him.
In a second dream sequence, Maria rushes to her printing press to correct an embarrassing typo which turns out to have been imagined. As she searches for the typo, more poems by Tarkovsky's father are heard. Maria's coworker Liza criticizes her for her neediness, calls her a bad mother, and expresses shock that her husband stayed with her for so long. Maria begins to cry then rushes off to the office shower. Liza skips away down the hall, and after struggling with the water supply Maria begins to laugh.
Returning to the present, Aleksei quarrels with his ex-wife, Natalia, who has custody of their son, Ignat. Aleksei remarks on her resemblance to his mother, and claims it is Natalia's face he sees when remembering her. (In fact, Natalia and Maria are portrayed by the same actress.) Natalia complains that Aleksei is selfish, and is at fault for his strained relationship with Maria. He protests that it is his mother's fault for being too controlling.
Meanwhile their Spanish Loyalist friends in the next room discuss the struggles of their life in exile, and the film cuts to newsreel scenes of the Spanish Civil War, then a balloon ascent in the USSR.
Ignat helps his mother pick up coins spilled from her purse as she prepares to leave him at Aleksei's flat, when he remarks on a sudden sensation of deja vu. When his mother leaves he turns to suddenly find an unfamiliar woman having tea in the flat, empty moments before. She asks him to read a letter by Pushkin. Pushkin argues that the split between Orthodoxy and European Catholicism gave Russia its distinctive character and says being Russian is a gift from God.}} Ignat leaves to answer the door, but when he returns, the woman has vanished, though the condensation from her teacup momentarily remains.
Aleksei calls, and in conversation mentions a red-haired girl he had a crush on at Ignat's age. The film then turns to this time during World War II, when Aleksei is sent to a dour military school for boys. (At this point, we see that Ignat and the twelve-year-old Aleksei are played by the same actor.) One boy, an orphan, is admonished by the instructor, and in retaliation pulls a grenade from his sack. The other boys scoop it up and pull the pin; the instructor throws himself on it to save the children, only to find it is a dummy. Newsreel footage is intercut of the war, the atomic bomb, and the Sino-Soviet border conflict. Tarkovsky's father recites a poem about living in denial of death, darkness, and fear.
After the war ends, Aleksei's father returns. Maria is still bitter, but the children tearfully greet him. In a third dream sequence, Natalia and Aleksei argue about who should have custody of Ignat, whose grades are suffering. Aleksei claims Ignat has expressed a desire to live with him, though what we have seen previously was only his asking to stay with him temporarily during renovations. He poses the question to Ignat, who denies having said such a thing.
After Ignat goes outside, Natalia flips through some photos of Maria and herself, remarking on their resemblance which Aleksei now denies. She mentions a man she is considering for marriage, whom Aleksei mocks, and reveals she remains in closer contact with Aleksei's mother than he. As Ignat burns a branch out the window they discuss Moses and the burning bush, and Natalia complains that she has never received a vision from God.
In voiceover Aleksei recalls a recurring dream of being at his childhood home but unable to enter, though the film presents us with different reminiscences of this time (in color, not the dream sequence's black and white).