Let me be called ignorant and aesthetically blind for I am going to call the work of Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Ruble” a slow death with nothingness and all the synonyms to it. I like things being abstract and the mind doing its work of absorbing like a sponge to do contain it even if it’s not clear. In this work, nothing is clear and is not intended it to be. It is an excruciatingly painful sparks of agony into the viewers of seeing many things and getting nothing out of it. I hereby state that Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev” and the one more film of him I watched, “The Sacrifice” as not my cup of poison.The movie separated in parts jumps off with an unrelated and weird sequence of a guy flying on a balloon and crashes eventually. The camera work from there on till end is outstanding and the production value is enormous. The film takes on the life journey of the 15th century painter Andrei Rublev (Anatoli Solonitsyn) who goes places, questions his faith, conscience and everything with no solid dialogues and no proper route to say those to make it introspection into our lives or admire/pity the life of Andrei.
The film while actually did not make the release years after its make have been praised for its cinematic value which in my very humble opinion was next to nada. I would like to put a puzzle together or read the hidden meaning and open to natural pace of any film maker who wants to bring the raw reality, but to play it without any purpose other than the political and religious situation of that time period with uninteresting screenplay is plainly unacceptable. The violence is quite gruesome considering the time period of the film’s making but for an outsider, how does it open up? It is a strange approach of giving an artist without his art till the last minute, but his questions of talent, life and everything around him as a dialogue which originates from a thin air keeps our air of frustration filled with blandness and pointless visuals.
The supporting characters are another fiasco. I was in close of not writing a review because of the confusion and frustration the film caused. I do not know what exactly I saw and what I grasped and what can I write, even saying that the film is bad. I had nothing to be grasped upon or to be imbibed in my memory to point out the inability of the film to make a statement. After a very long time, I seriously doubted on whether to write anything at all about a movie. I do not know what to criticize upon being bad. Everything was shot according to the highly technical potential of those times but the substance is without soul. We cannot connect or make even a remote attachment to this character that sees all brutalities and yet when he takes a life altering decision of negating his talent and giving up his choice to speak, we neither sympathize nor empathize with him. Not alone with him but with any character at all.
I am wondered by the very many people who managed to like this film. Watching a film and having an opinion as I have said on numerous occasions is subjective. The films I hated would have been loved by many and vice versa. I respect that and understand the tastes of various other film goers. I have been questioned about that belief through this movie. With a snail slow running length of 205 minutes, this is one big void of big bucks cashed in during tough times. I was made impatient, angry and deep down inside even cursing the film maker. I began to feel guilty for these emotions rather than getting out of it, meaning emotionally attached to the scenes in the film.
I finished the review of the film “The Sacrifice” like this, “Maybe someday when I watch it after several years, maybe, just maybe I would be able to appreciate it for what everyone is saying. But right now, I am waiting for the next Tarkovsky movie to see and hope I can read it properly and understand the greatness of this legend.” I seriously doubt that I will ever understand both these movies and yet, I am not giving up hope. I still await the next film of this much lauded director. While this film broke my patience, let me see how many does it take for Tarkovsky to break my patience altogether in watching his movies.
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