The Sacrifice

Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky

1986

*****

Andrei Tarkovsky’s last ever film might just be my favorite of his. 1986’s The Sacrifice is astonishingly good, even by the directors great standards. Although Tarkovsky was unaware of his impending death, it now feels like an intention conclusion to his work in retrospect, especially as the the final shot of the film echoes the opening shot of a tree in his first feature film Ivan's Childhood. A conspiracy theory emerged in Russia in the early 1990s when it was alleged that Tarkovsky did not die of natural causes but was assassinated by the KGB. Evidence for this hypothesis includes testimonies by former KGB agents who claim that the order was given to eradicate Tarkovsky to curtail what the Soviet government and the KGB saw as anti-Soviet propaganda. Other evidence includes several memoranda that surfaced after the 1991 coup and the claim by one of Tarkovsky's doctors that his cancer could not have developed from a natural cause. However, his wife Larisa Tarkovskaya and actor Anatoli Solonitsyn all died from the very same type of lung cancer. Vladimir Sharun, a sound designer who worked with all three in Stalker, is convinced that they were all poisoned by the chemical plant where they were shooting the film. Either way, he was a great loss to the world of film but left an amazing body of work behind him. The Sacrifice opens on the birthday of Alexander (Erland Josephson), an actor who gave up the stage to work as a journalist, critic, and lecturer on aesthetics. He lives in a beautiful house with his actress wife Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), stepdaughter Marta (Filippa Franzén), and young son, "Little Man", who is temporarily mute due to a throat operation. Alexander and Little Man plant a tree by the seaside, when Alexander's friend Otto, a part-time postman, delivers a birthday card to him. After a long conversation about many different subjects Otto asks about God and Alexander mentions that his relationship with God is nonexistent. After Otto leaves, Adelaide and Victor, a medical doctor and a close family friend who performed Little Man's operation, arrive at the scene and offer to take Alexander and Little Man home in Victor's car. However, Alexander prefers to stay behind and talk to his son. In his monologue, Alexander first recounts how he and Adelaide found this lovely house near the sea by accident, and how they fell in love with the house and surroundings, but then enters a bitter tirade against the state of modern man. As Tarkovsky wrote, Alexander is weary of the pressures of change, the discord in his family, and his instinctive sense of the threat posed by the relentless march of technology. In fact, he has grown to hate the emptiness of human speech. The family, as well as Victor and Otto, gather at Alexander's house for the celebration. Their maid Maria leaves, while nurse-maid Julia stays to help with the dinner. People comment on Maria's odd appearances and behavior. The guests chat inside the house, where Otto reveals that he is a student of paranormal phenomena, a collector of inexplicable but true incidences. Just when the dinner is almost ready, the rumbling noise of low-flying jet fighters interrupts them, and soon after, as Alexander enters, a news program announces the beginning of what appears to be all-out war, and possibly nuclear holocaust. In despair, he vows to God to sacrifice all he loves, even Little Man, if this may be undone. Otto advises him to slip away and lie with Maria, who Otto convinces him is a witch, "in the best possible sense". Alexander takes his gun, leaves a note in his room, escapes the house, and rides his bike to where she is staying. She is bewildered when he makes his advances, but when he puts his gun to his temple the jet-fighters' rumblings return, so she soothes him and they consummate while floating above her bed, though Alexander's reaction is ambiguous. When he awakes the next morning, in his own bed, everything seems normal. Nevertheless, Alexander sets forth to give up all he loves and possesses. He tricks the family members and friends into going for a walk, and sets fire to their house when they are away. As the group rushes back, alarmed by the fire, Alexander confesses that he set the fire himself, and furiously runs around. Maria, who until then was not seen that morning, appears in the fire scene. Alexander tries to approach her, but is restrained by others. Without explanation, an ambulance appears in the area, and two paramedics chase Alexander, who appears to have lost control of himself, and drive off with him. Maria begins to bicycle away, but stops halfway to observe Little Man watering the tree he and Alexander planted the day before. As Maria leaves the scene, the "mute" Little Man, lying at the foot of the tree, speaks his only line, which quotes the opening Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word. Why is that, Papa?". In 1995, the Vatican compiled a list of 45 'great films', separated into the categories of "Religion", "Values", and "Art", to recognize the centennial of cinema. The Sacrifice was included under the category "Religion", along with Tarkovsky's earlier film Andrei Rublev. I can’t help but think that the Vatican missed the point. Tarkovsky considered The Sacrifice different from his earlier films because, while he commented that his recent films had been "impressionistic in structure", in this case he not only "aimed...to develop its episodes in the light of my own experience and of the rules of dramatic structure", but also to "build the picture into a poetic whole in which all the episodes were harmoniously linked", and that because of this, it "took on the form of a poetic parable". While Andrei Rublev rejects the advances of an alluring pagan witch as incompatible with Christian love, The Sacrifice juxtaposes both sensibilities and ends up being somewhat religiously ambiguous. The Sacrifice originated as a screenplay entitled The Witch, which preserved the element of a middle-aged protagonist spending the night with a reputed witch. However, in this story, his cancer was miraculously cured, and he ran away with the woman. In 1982, Tarkovsky wrote in his journal that he considered this ending weak, as the happy ending was unchallenged. It seems to have been a deeply personal film to Tarkovsky, open to interpretation in many respects with an eerie feeling that it was a swan song, even though it wasn’t intended as such. The film’s ending is infamous, not just in that it is incredibly moving and now iconic, but because it was a second take. Alexander's house, specially built for the production, was to be burned for the climactic finale, in which he burns it down along with all of his possessions. The shot was very difficult to achieve and just as the house was lit the shutter of the only camera filming jammed shut. The house burned down without a single second of it captured on film. Divine intervention? The scene had to be re-shot, requiring a quick and very costly reconstruction of the house in two weeks. This time, two cameras were set up on tracks, running parallel to each other. The footage in the final version of the film is the second take, which lasts for six minutes (and ends abruptly because the camera had run through an entire reel). The cast and crew broke down in tears after the take was completed.  Unbelievably (although not for a Tarkovsky film), there are only 115 shots in the entire 140 minute film. It’s an incredible film, one that is still discussed all these years later.