The Sacrifice

Saw The Sacrifice, a film by Tarkovsky.  It's a slow film, full of meditative, minutes-long takes the seems to deal mostly with the nature of faith and sacrifice.  The plot follows a retired actor (or philosopher or something) who lives in a pleasant but small cottage with his wife and some small boy who I think is their grandson.  It is the man's birthday and he at the birthday dinner party, they get news that world war 3 (or some similar calamity) has broken out.  He drunkenly promises god that he will sacrifice everything if he can make things go back to normal.  The son-in-law, a doctor, has a handgun in his doctor's bag.

The film opens with the protagonist telling the young boy about a monk who watered a dead tree for years until it miraculously blossomed.  He professes a belief in the power of ritual and claims that if you repeat an action enough times, something must change.  "It has to."  This sets up the central interest of the film: the irrationality of belief and the equally irrational expectation that it be rewarded in some way.  The film intelligently favors realism and shows that this irrational belief is not purely a good thing, but has real costs to the believer and their loved ones.

Not only religious faith is examined however.  The protagonist explains to the ever-present boy that he has sacrificed his life for the sake of art and philosophy.  He has not truly lived, but merely prepared himself for a life of reflection which is both monastic and worldly.  He is a paralyzed academic, knowing all and doing nothing.  In the intellectual tradition, this is a valuable and admirable life, but it too costs him something.

These dual kinds of faith and sacrifice are subtly referenced and contrasted many times in the film.  The actor complains that much of society is full of this sort of destruction, usually as a result of the fear of death.  He denounces all of civilization as founded on vanity and sin, which he defines to be decadence and unnecessary things.  His house and the rooms inside are extremely spare to the point of looking like sound stages and he's always listening to restrained, subtle Japanese flute music.  This is a very advanced form of taste and culture and affectation and vanity.

The film is very Tarkovsky-ish, filled with slow shots of strange things and with (maybe?) dream sequences involving broken furniture and dripping water.  It's full of ambivalence and intriguing details which don't seem to go anywhere.  The protagonist receives an outdated map of Europe as a present, for example, and their postman seems to fake a heart attack for some reason.  There's a scene where the protagonist's wife must be sedated and as she struggles her dress hitches up, exposing her beautiful legs.

It's a slow and meditative film.  It's not super gripping, however the mystery of what will be sacrificed and how kept me awake.  It's the sort of film that's perfect for a film class: full of intriguing ideas and symbols and themes, ripe for discussion and argument.