Andrei Rublev (1966)

I've always wanted to check out more Tarkovsky. I own Solaris, and have seen it 2 or 3 times, liking it more with each viewing, because I'm always learning and noticing new things. An appreciation really grows. It's been a while, but what struck me most about Solaris was the theme of things never changing. I really don't know, it's hard to describe. Just the way that Kris' wife magically appears on Solaris, and he thinks everything will be serene and that he's learned from his past mistakes, but she's still the same, and continually attempts to kill herself. So, I read about Bergman, who's my personal favorite director, and I found this:

"Late one evening in 1971, Bergman and his friend and director Kjell Grede by pure coincidence stumbled upon a copy of Andrei Rublev in a screening room at Svensk Filmindustri. They saw it without any subtitles. He ranks it to be one of his most startling and unforgettable movie experiences ever."

Needless to say, seeing Rublev was a high priority after this. Plus, it's one of my good friend Brent's favorite films of all time. If you know Brent, you know he knows film.

It's hard to write about Andrei Rublev, especially if you're young and haven't seen it before. To tell you the truth, it's an overwhelming movie. At 205 minutes length, it's not an easy film to watch, by today's standards. The pacing is very slow and methodical, but it's never boring. I was expecting something more in the style of your plain ol' American biopic, but Rublev is much more than that. It's a work of art, plain and simple, one meant to be studied laboriously.

The plot follows a stretch in the life of Rublev, a Russian painter who lived at the beginning of the 15th Century. Despite being somebody else's story (not to mention one 500 years old), Tarkovsky has made this an intensely personal picture. It's a story about passion, faith, suffering, and guilt. I hate to keep gushing, but it's a movie of unquestionable beauty and importance. I really can't find much else to say about it.

It's strange, the movie's bookended by two sequences that have very little bearing on the main plot. In the opening, a peasant steals a primitive hot-air balloon and goes for a joyride and ends up crashing. As an epilogue, there's a story about a young boy whose Father was a bell-maker which runs almost an entire hour. A bell needs to be created, and the boy insists that his Father was the only one who knew the secret to bell-making, and passed it onto him while he was dying. The rest covers the creation of the bell in great detail, leading up to the nail-biting "will it even ring?" climax. At first glance, it seems wholly inappropriate for the film to end with this little story. However, once you think about it, it's so right.