mgphd Review of Father and Son

Father and Son (2003)

A Film of Great Beauty on Perhaps the Most Important Current Topic

[18 June 2004]

This is an extraordinary film that explores an area still barely touched by artists and other, academic psychologists: the father-son bond, its complexity, ambivalence, pathos, and depth. All are illuminated by the director, Alexander Sokurov. The text is spare; the cinematography is heartbreakingly beautiful. (I have not seen a man's face explored as intimately on screen since Olivier Martinez was filmed in THE CHAMBERMAID ON THE TITANIC.) Every man who has had a father must see this film. It speaks of what Nicole Oxenhandler calls the eros of parenthood but now at the level of the male's late adolescence. Sokurov understands the tension between love and rivalry that is at the core of the son-father relationship. Like the relationship itself, the audio is quiet, with the occasional outburst. Sokurov confirms that a young man learns how to love (women, other men, eventually his own sons and daughters) by loving his father, in early boyhood (which we only have hints about in the film) and then again at the time when son and father must separate. Fathers, take you son to see this film.