THE SACRIFICE d: Andrei Tarkovsky

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:

Watching Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s final work, Offret / The Sacrifice (1986), is an exercise in cinema appreciation. That's not because The Sacrifice is a great film, but because it has great moments interspersed with moments of sheer boredom. In fact, The Sacrifice is one of those rare films that goes to the antipodes of what is good and bad in that art form. Overall, it’s worth seeing; but it is in no way, shape, or form a great film — much less a masterpiece.

Tarkovsky, who had fled the Soviet Union, filmed The Sacrifice in Sweden, using Swedish actors – including Erland Josephson, the star of many Ingmar Bergman films — and Bergman’s longtime cinematographer Sven Nykvist. This was a wise choice, as The Sacrifice is one of the more arresting visual works anyone is likely to see onscreen, especially in its interesting choice of medium shots as the dominant frame, or mise-en-scene.

Yet, instead of maximizing the positive traits of Tarkovsky and the Bergman contingent, The Sacrifice falters by bringing out the worst elements of both Tarkovsky and Bergman. As an example: Tarkovsky wrote the screenplay; like most Tarkovsky films The Sacrifice is long (142 minutes on the Kino DVD), but it lacks the subtle poesy found in his earlier films (Solaris, Stalker), indulging instead on overwrought scenes of terror and regret. Compounding matters, the film's last three quarters are filled with some astonishingly bad acting — which has to be laid at Tarkovsky's feet.

Bergman, who was possibly the greatest screenwriter of the twentieth century, was always concise in his screenplays. Whereas that strength of Bergman is ignored in The Sacrifice, Bergman’s greatest weakness is employed: a relentlessly depressing view of life and its characters. One knows from the beginning that they are all doomed, and save for the youngest character, this comes to fruition.

Actually, even that exception is only so if one renders the most positive interpretation of the film possible. In all other ways, the ending is likely a delusion, which means Bergmanian dourness combined with a dearth of Tarkovskian poesy to make The Sacrifice dark, despairing, and oftentimes dull.

The tone The Sacrifice strikes invokes two of Bergman’s greatest films from the 1960s: Winter Light and Shame. However, Tarkovsky's effort is nowhere near the level of those two earlier classics, despite its Chekhovian chamber drama feel and almost anti-filmic posturing.

On the positive side, Tarkovsky is such a great a director that even by indulging in his worst self-pitying modes (he was dying of cancer at the time of filming) he was unable to create an unmemorable film or one whose imagery would not stick with the viewer long after the final credits.

Before I dissect the ills and successes of The Sacrifice any further, let me give a précis on its screenplay. And this is what actually takes place onscreen (as opposed to information available in press releases):

The lead character is a man named Alexander (Erland Josephson), who is seen with a young child called Little Man (Tommy Kjellqvist). Later we surmise that the boy is Alexander’s son. He also has a wife and apparently a teenage daughter, Julia (Valerie Mairesse). We know next to nothing about the clan, despite many reviews which claim Alexander is an atheist or an artist, Little Man a mute, and the younger wife (by two or so decades) an actress. None of this is conveyed in the film itself — or at least not in the golden subtitles found on the Kino DVD.

While planting a tree on the shores of a sea, Alexander tells Little Man some homilies, then talks with a neighbor, a postman named Otto (Allan Edwall – another Bergman regular), who is clearly not in his right mind. They return to Alexander’s house, and debate philosophic and other matters.

Then, we hear the roar of missiles overhead. The house shakes, but we see little of the devastation that the characters feel, as they listen to TV reports of a war having been unleashed. After Otto faints, the others retire for the night, and Alexander recites the Lord’s Prayer, begging that he will give up all to undo the war so his family and friends can live in peace. Given that The Sacrifice is contemporaneous, and the Cold War was in its death throes at the time, such pessimism is odd. Tarkovsky, however, handles it well. (The representations of Alexander's state of mind, for instance, are aptly conveyed through the use of color, sepia tones, and black and white.)