I watched once again The Sacrifice, the last of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films. This time I found it ridiculous and boring, and I think that is because I do accept the pact upon which the film turns, namely, that if God accepts as a bargain that if a person gives up all he loves the destruction of mankind will be averted. The construct assumes that (a) God exists, (b) God accepts the bargain, (c) God will keep His part of it, and is able to do so. The mute boy’s only words begin with a paraphrase of the beginning of the gospel of John: in the beginning was the Word. But it is not the beginning, but the end; and which is why The Sacrifice is Tarkovsky’s weakest film, and ends with the supplication from Bach’s St Matthew Passion, when Peter, having denied Christ, sings Erbarme dich, which is nothing less than the renunciation of the soul.
The bargain appears in Stalker, but in that film it is identified but not sought; and it is not sought because destruction already has begun and is irrevocable. The inevitability of destruction is also at the centre of Solaris. The consequences of destruction are faithfully examined in Ivan’s Childhood. It is the children of a lost Eden who find the apples that have fallen. The Sacrifice also has its tree of life. In Nostalghia the bargain is accepted, but it is between two men, who, when both are spiritually exhausted, die from the work of their own hands.
In the final sequence of The Mirror, set in a wood used as setting in other of Tarkovsky’s films, Bach’s St John Passion begins to play, and the man asks the pregnant woman ‘do you want a boy or a girl?’; She does not answer, but after a while smiles. And the grandmother, or equivalently, the pregnant women in her later years, brings the young girl and young boy from the forest to the meadow. That is, if we are right throughout all these years, then the answer is before us.
It is Andrei Rublev, with its directive conclusion that the icon of faith derives from the artistry of the artifice of life, that is Tarkovsky’s most momentous work. But the film’s final scene, of four horses in the rain at the river, is the presentiment of apocalypse.
It seems to me that there is a distinct falling off of creative worth in the two films made after Tarkovsky left his native Russia. Part of this may be the result of alienation and cultural isolation, but part of it is also, I think, that the creative path shrivelled after the extraordinary self-examination presented in The Mirror. This film I regard, after Andrei Rublev, as Tarkovsky’s finest.