Father And Son

Father and Son Review

The man responsible for the awe-inspiring one-take wonder that was historical epic" "Russian Ark" has returned with a far more intimate, but no less stunning, work of art. The second part of Russian director Alexandr Sokurov's planned family trilogy kicked off by "Mother and Son" in 1997, "Father and Son" opens to the sounds of heavy breathing and a close-up of softly-lit writhing male limbs which are slowly revealed to belong to a young man cradled and soothed out of a nightmare by his rugged father. And so the intensity of this particularly familial relationship is established complete with a homoerotic charge that Sokurov angrily dismissed as a creation of "sick European minds" at the film's screening in Cannes last year. However you decide to view their connection, there's no doubting its intensity and the almost plotless film charts both figures' painful realization that their tender but suffocating bond cannot - and should not - last.

And while even art house audiences might tire of the film's irony free ambiguity, "Father and Son" makes up for in gorgeousness what it lacks in clear-cut characterization or plot. Bathed in a sunset glow and with Lisbon doubling up as an imaginary Russian seaport, this is above all an unforgettably beautiful film as the overpowering interiors of the father and son's rooftop flat break out into dazzling city vistas. Some will, no doubt, draw political parallels, others will decry the homoeroticism and yet more will just label it as tedious but let yourself be hypnotized by the beauty on display and "Father and Son" might just draw you in.