The Sacrifice Blu-ray Review
Encounters at the end of the world in Tarkovsky’s sublime final film.
Reviewed by Casey Broadwater, July 9, 2011
The great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky made just seven feature films during his nearly thirty-year career—including
Andrei Rublev,
Solaris,
The Mirror, and
Stalker—and his swansong,
The Sacrifice, serves not only as a summation of his life's work,
but also as his final thoughts on faith, mankind, and the modern age. Shot while Tarkovsky, then 53, was dying of cancer, the film has an inescapably
reflective, elegiac quality, but its inherent sadness is bookended in the opening and closing scenes by a potent symbol of optimism—a tree that will
bloom if tended—and it's worth noting that the director dedicated the film to his son Andriosha "with hope and confidence." In his excellent book on
film theory,
Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky himself stated that the film is "a parable" and that "the significant events it contains can be
interpreted in more than one way." While theses events are often intentionally vague—there is the possibility, for example, that some of the film, if not
most of it, is a dream—the subject of the parable is quite clear: self-sacrifice as an act that's capable of changing individual lives and indeed all of
human history.
The Sacrifice is something of an homage to director Ingmar Bergman, as the two filmmakers shared a mutual admiration. (Bergman once
called Tarkovsky "the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.")
One of only two of Tarkovsky's features to be produced outside the U.S.S.R., the film was shot on the Swedish island of Faro—where the reclusive
Bergman lived and set many of his own movies—and the lensing was done by longtime Bergman collaborator Sven Nykvist, one of the world's most
acclaimed cinematographers.
The Sacrifice also stars Erland Josephson, who, like Max Von Sydow, showed up in most of Bergman's
important works. These surface similarities, however, give way to deeper shared thematic concerns. Both directors were cinematic philosophers of
religion and faith—exploring mankind's uneasy relationship with God—and both had preoccupations with the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Of
course, there are stylistic parallels between the filmmakers as well, including a fondness for surrealist dream sequences, stark imagery, and long,
meandering wide shots.
The Sacrifice opens with one of the latter, a single nine-minute and twenty-six second tracking shot—the longest in the film, and the
longest in Tarkovsky's career—in which Alexander (Josephson), a late middle-aged atheist, journalist, and former actor, plants a barren Japanese tree
by the seaside with his young son, whom he calls "Little Man." (The nickname is clearly symbolic, as the boy represents the future of all mankind.)
While they position the tree in the ground, Alexander tells his son—who has just had a neck surgery, and is temporarily mute—the story of a monk
who instructed his pupil to diligently water a similarly withered tree at the top of a mountain until it bloomed. Alexander seems obsessed with the
idea of performing a simple act—like the daily watering of a plant—that can produce a positive change in the world. Later, when the island's quasi-
prophetic postman, Otto (Allan Edwall), bicycles out to the beach to deliver a telegram, we learn that it is Alexander's birthday. His dutiful doctor
friend, Victor (Sven Wollter), has arrived, and along with Alexander's younger actress wife, Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), and their teenaged daughter,
Marta, they plan to have a small party at their quaint seaside house, a home that looks not unlike the one in
Through a Glass Darkly, the
Bergman film Tarkovsky draws upon most here.
The celebration is dampened by the screech of a jet overhead, rattling the wine glasses and knocking over a pitcher of milk, which shatters on the
ground. (An image the director previously used in
Mirror.) An announcer on a flickering television set skirts around the obvious—World War
III has begun, heralded by the launch of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction. The TV screen cuts to black, the phone line goes dead,
and an atmosphere of apocalyptic uncertainty descends on the house. Adelaide has a mental breakdown and has to be sedated. Julia, one of the
maids, refuses to wake up Little Man from his nap, hoping that if annihilation does suddenly arrive, it will happen while the boy is asleep. And
Alexander, a professed atheist who nonetheless feels the world has lost its sense of spirituality, falls to his knees and recites the Lord's Prayer.
Bargaining with God, he proposes a Faustian trade: ""I will give Thee all I have. I'll give up my family, whom I love. I'll destroy my home, and give
up Little Man. I'll be mute and never speak another word to anyone. I will relinquish everything that binds me to life, if only Thou dost restore
everything as it was before, as it was this morning." Salvation comes in the form of love from one of Alexander's maids, Maria (Gudún S. Gísladóttir),
who may or may not be a witch.
This is a film that should be felt first and analyzed later. There's an emotional scene where Alexander sits with Maria in her decrepit cottage and
describes the memory of trying to tame his dying mother's overgrown garden with shears and a scythe. He breaks down in tears when he recalls
looking out the window and seeing that the "order" he thought he imposed on the garden actually destroyed its wild beauty. Replace "Alexander"
with "mankind" and "the garden" with "the Earth," and you have a wonderful bit of subtext about environmentalism, but the film's real theme is
larger than even that—the need for a turn away from a purely material existence and toward some kind of spiritual, holistic approach to life. There's
no getting away from it; Tarkovsky was a professed Christian, and
The Sacrifice is one of his most explicitly religious films. But don't let this
turn you off if you're not of the same persuasion. There's deep, poetic feeling at work here that's truly universal.
It should go without saying that
The Sacrifice is not an "easy" film—although it's arguably one of Tarkovsky's more accessible pictures—and
not one to be watched casually. The director's glacially slow tracking shots are both wide and long, distancing us from the characters—there are
relatively few close-ups—and forcing us to mentally engage with what we're watching. Those with the patience to see it through will be rewarded
with a profound and affecting experience. This was essentially Tarkovsky's deathbed statement—he would die less than a year after making it—and
he couldn't have chosen better parting words.
The Sacrifice Blu-ray, Video Quality
I have mixed feelings about Kino's 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer of
The Sacrifice. On the one hand, the film definitely looks much better than it
ever has on home video—it's quite a drastic improvement in overall clarity and color balance—but on the other, it displays some traits that detract from
the beauty of Sven Nykvist's evocative cinematography. The main problem is that the image doesn't always look naturally filmic. It appears that some
slight DNR has been used to smooth out grain—which is still partially there but often looks somewhat frozen in place—and edge enhancement is
frequently visible in the form of white haloes that appear on hard outlines. This is especially visible outdoors, when trees and people are silhouetted
against the sky, but if you look for it, it's there in just about every scene. If you have a smaller TV screen it won't be as noticeable, but those of you
using larger screens or projectors will definitely see it. I don't have any inside details, but to me, this looks like a transfer that was prepared for cable
broadcast. That said, there
is a significant upgrade in clarity when compared to prior DVD releases. Clothing often yields up its textures, and fine
detail is frequently discernable in the actors' faces. The film goes through a number of intentional color shifts—from realistic, to stark black and white, to
lightly sepia tinged—and the transfer handles these changes without any problems. Although black levels can be a bit grayish during darker scenes, most
color is suitably dense. It's a shame the image couldn't have been less doctored—and I'm not sure why that is—but
The Sacrifice still looks
strong and you won't be sorry to trade in your old DVD copy.
