GROSS DISTRACTION - final movies
He didn't know it would be his last film but Tarkovsky's 'The Sacrifice' is very very final.
I’m changing the name of these out-of-sequence, in-between pieces - from ‘diversion’ to ‘distraction’, since that’s what they really are…
THE SACRIFICE, director ANDREJ TARKOVSKY, cast ERLAND JOSEPHSON, SUSAN FLEETWOOD, ALLAN EDWALL, distribution SANDREW METRONOME, 1986, 142 MINUTES.
People are saying that Warner Brothers have buried what is probably Clint Eastwood’s last movie (he’s 94, right?). Eastwood’s film, Juror #2, is a $35M legal thriller - an adult drama centred on an ethical dilemma. So I was wondering, what will your final movie be about?
I mean assuming you'll make one (you'll have some notes at least, in that little book you carry around with you). And where do you think you'll be? Will you be away from home, across the narrow sea from the country of your birth?
Presumably, when you get around to it, you'll be looking back across your life. And you'll probably find yourself dwelling on your regrets (or on regret in general, the whole business of regret). It might be a kind of dense, looping meditation on regret, your final film. There might be some weighty symbolic figures - a burning house, a mute child, a mirror, a ladder, a bicycle. That kind of thing.
You might consider a kind of pagan or at least an irrelegious element - in which a servant, say, is classified as a witch and called upon to save the world. She'll do so - quietly, uncomplainingly - and you'll consequently be able to forget all about the terrifyingly-realised threat of nuclear holocaust that will haunt the first act of your final movie. It’ll be like it never happened.
And you might find yourself paying elaborate tribute to an artist you revere - even trying to shoot on his favourite island (you won’t be allowed to) and re-using some of his cast. And then you'll probably finish your movie with a kind of mordant comedy chase scene in which your hero’s devastated family and two Keystone paramedics will splash around after him in the marshy ground next to that spectacularly burning house.
And if you do all this you'll have created something so luminous and so definitive that it'll feel like a swansong or a consolidation even though you're actually only 54 and have half your career ahead of you. But by then you'll have been diagnosed with cancer and you’ll die in a few months anyway - so quickly, in fact, that you won't even be able to attend the Cannes Film Festival where your film will win all the prizes - as if retrospectively to confim the actual finality of your final film.
To be clear - and what I really should have said above - Andrej Tarkovsky’s final movie The Sacrifice is a beautiful, entirely satisfying movie. The kind of existential poem that we allow from only a handful of cinema artists, a simple reminder that Tarkovsky was one of them and a heartbreaking message about mortality (that wasn’t really meant to be).
The Sacrifice is on Amazon Prime and on Kino. If you watch it on Kino, don’t expect to get it up on your fancy smart TV, though (I managed to do so but only via the stupid browser on the stupid Chromecast). Kino has subtly dropped the funky, Soviet-era branding since the war in Ukraine and the selection of mostly Eastern European movies is really impressive.
Tarkovsky shot his final movie in Sweden when he was invited to by the Swedish Film Institute. He hired actors who’d worked with Ingmar Bergman, including his lead Erland Josephson.
Tarkovsky had to shoot the final scene of The Sacrifice, in which the family’s house burns down, twice. The first time the camera jammed so the house had to be rebuilt, at enormous cost, and burnt down again - this time with two cameras.
Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 is in cinemas now (but not many cinemas).
This review (and others) is on Letterboxd.