Tarkovsky’s Mirror. The scenes with the narrator and his wife are barely alive in the screenplay, but in the film! The character of the wife, Natalia was added into the film as it was being made. Margarita Terekhova is astonishing. The narrator is guilty. The screenplay tempts us to identify him with Tarkovsky; and we see a poster for Andrei Rublev in the narrator’s flat. But he is someone else (who does the narrator allow Tarkovsky, allow us, to be?). – The narrator is irresponsible, he neglects his son, taunts his wife. He is remiss. We sense his father was similar – at least, his return is greeted as a sudden surprising benediction by his children. Perhaps the reasons for his behaviour do not matter. He seems dislocated – the world is not real enough for him. He is like a ghost.
I think of a book I read many years ago: Peace, by Gene Wolfe. You can find it in the science fiction section of the bookshop. The protagonist is a dead man. You have to work it out; it isn’t easy. Took me three reads to see not only that he is a ghost, but that he had been a murderer, too, and he remembers the murders he committed (though this is not clear to the reader). The same scene in Peace as in Mirror: the protagonist is told he has a limited time to live. It’s all coming to an end. And the same fantastic quality to that scene: it is not real, as it were, and it is not meant to be.
What does it matter? I am thinking of Mirror's narrator. Thinking of a sense of unreality I experienced today as I walked home from work. And a sense of responsibilities that will open before me one day that I could – could, not would – shirk. My excuse? I imagine it would be similar to the narrator of the film: I’m after something else, I want something else. How indulgent and melodramatic!
I read a screenplay many years ago by Bergman – The Touch – I’ve never seen it. I remember the male protagonist breaking up a marriage – why? Resentment? The desire to tear a hole open in the world, to break something open? It is more than resentment. A kind of frustration with the unreality of things, of the absence of affect. Where does it lead? Petulant rage … sabotage … self-indulgence. Smashing up lives.
I remembered the same character when I saw the film Liv Ullman made with Bergman’s script: Faithless. And felt a kind of anger at the philanderers who would smash up their lives to escape – to escape what? When I read The Touch, I did so as one who was outside, far outside the world of work. When I saw Faithless, I was on the verge of getting a job, but still outside (it was a short term contract …) Today, remembering both I thought: now I am the bourgeois with the job and the mortgage, I am one who will be able to shirk responsibility. I know I won’t. But what a strange feeling to be part of the world – if I experience the unreality of that world, I do so from a secure place within it (although my current contract runs out in 6 months …)
Natalia. Think of the way she looks at the narrator. They have had a life together, a child. They a share a history, yet what do they share? Now the narrator has turned from her. He gently satirises her account of her new lover, a writer. He is like a ghost, removed from everything. And his son? He is burning things in the yard, poking at them with a stick. Another ghost, a ghost in the making, just like me.
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