Father and Son

Audience Reviews

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02/16/2014 Haunting and sensual. Can a father and son really relate that way? Can anyone? Confronting and inspiring. See more 04/14/2012 Strange and bewildering, yet somehow beautiful. The poetic atmosphere keeps it going. See more 08/24/2011 Although the film is quite complex for an average movie watcher, I'd say that it's able to deliver a beautiful portrayal of absolute love of a son towards his father. I would recommend to watch this film with an open-mind... See more 04/29/2011 Avant-garde to the extreme, this film plays out like it really wants to be a smart, artistic film with beautiful imagery and little dialogue, but it really just comes off banal and a half-assed attempt at something truly poetic. Everything symbolic feels trite or so dense that Sokurov's metaphors are lost within everything else. Only a couple of moments did I feel like I was starting to understand what he was trying to say before he went and lost me again. Honestly, it felt like I was watching a foreign meldorama disguised as a foreign art film. There's a great deal of talk about the homo-erotic qualities to it; there are moments, but I could feel what he was trying to do was comment on the relationship of a father and his son and what that ultimately means, but all that needed to be subtext wasn't and all that needed to be said wasn't said at all. Whatever he was trying to convey, it got lost in his passion for trying to say it in the first place. The only thing I came out of it with was some nice cinematography. See more 06/13/2010 Alexander Sokurov made a big name for himself with "Russian Ark" a.k.a. that film that was done in a single take. His next film "Father And Son" is a disappointment, intended to be the 2nd part of a trilogy with his eloquent 1997 film "Mother And Son" and a future film yet to be made, this one focuses on the titular relationship. It's a nice looking film concerning the love/hate relationship between military student Alexei and his lonely father, however there are a few scenes which added little to nothing, the acting was OK the dialogue feels a little forced and the alleged homoeroticism (a term which only comes up whenever two men have their shirt off) has put plenty of people off. Even for a relatively short film it seems to drag quite hard, that lack of focus doesn't help either. It works OK as a visual poem/psychological study, watch "Mother And Son" instead, or Andrei Zvyagintsev's "The Return". See more 05/25/2010 I wasn't going to review this, but seeing the comments below I was kind of forced to. This film works brilliantly on a number of levels, but I'll limit myself to just two; 1. For those looking for plot and missing it, trying looking at this as the story of Jesus Christ *before* he was born on Earth. That is the father and son relationship inherent and repeating itself since God 'created' Adam (was anyone ever bothered by Michelangelo's representation of that fatherly and sonly love?). That same story is the story of a son growing up, finding his own shoes instead of trying to step into his father's and, no, this story does not have an ending in a classical sense. but it has a beginning where the ending should be and I take that any day. 2. For those looking for substance, just look past the symbolism (which btw draws masterfully on the legacy of Tarkovsky, Felini, etc.) and think that this story has never (to my knowledge) been told like this before. Sure, Russian literature and film are full of examples of father-son relations (too many examples to mention), but for me this was the first time it had been explored from this unique viewpoint of mutual tenderness, love and compassion. In short, whatever your relationship with your father was or is, think whether you would not want to dwell on the experience of 'Father and Son' when dealing with your own possible fatherhood. And I'm not being sexist here - current, future and potential mothers may discover a side of masculinity here that they may not even have know that they were missing. See more Read all reviews

Father and Son

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