sacrifice

Briefly here are a couple of unpopular views for you. Having watched Andrei Tarkovsky's final film The Sacrifice last night for the first time I have to say that although I generally love his films I really disliked long sections of this film.

It's overlong, overly static, stagey, portentous, has too much talking, too many tableaux, and only intermittently has the striking images and sense of existential dread that I find in his other films.

Some of that I would say is the fault of Tarkovsky and perhaps of the difficult shoot. However, and here's the second unpopular opinion, I think part of the blame has to rest with cinematographer Sven Nyquist. Now I know that for his work with Ingmar Bergman, for this film, and for many of his other films Nyquist is greatly admired. I am not so convinced of his abilities. In Sacrifice as well as in films by less skilled directors his work is flat, leaden and uninteresting.

There are moments that work: the opening, the very end (if there were fewer words), the camera moving sideways through trees, the actor talking to himself alone in the grass, the black and white passages, the actor waking toward the end and finding everything is as it was, and the model house. The rest somehow never gels. A shame.