Sokurov's second installation of an anticipated trilogy started with Mother and Son (1996). Seven years after, Sokurov returned to a similar intimate familial theme (this time a young son and his father). The movie's content lacks a significant depth, yet it has Sokurov's beautiful imagery, and that makes it worthy if you're in the mood of well-crafted visual compositions. The movie opens to a zoom shot that evokes the inaugurating sequence in Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour: a father trying to calm his son after a nightmare replaces the famous image of the two lovers emerging from the sand and remains of the atomic bomb, interestingly enough both scenes share a notable eroticism.
Father and Son paints a very questionable male-bonding theme: nudity, physical proximity, and the tension between the two men add an unsettling feeling in the viewer. To be clear this didn't add any substance to the material. Some scenes: early in the movie the camera is playfully flirting with the young couple. The movie ends on a thematic and visual symmetry (a dream also), a smart trick by Sokurov was the fact that the viewer can not identify whose dream (or nightmare) it was: the father or the son.
Overall, worth seeing for its imagery. This is the Trailer.
WASSIM
