Clumsy expectations and misunderstandings smashing into reality.
It helps, when watching the stunning catharsis of The Sacrifice, to know that the director Andrei Tarkovsky made it while in exile from the Soviet Union—and was dying, but didn’t realize it yet. The film feels like a final gesture, trembling in the gap between the immediate and the cosmic. Whatever Tarkovsky’s balletically long shots are watching—an old man and his son on the seaside, or a wife slowly clacking her way across a wood floor with barely concealed scorn, or a servant trembling at the certainty that they’re all about to die in a nuclear holocaust—they radiate both grandiosity and humility, mourning and loving…
