EASTERN ELEGY

Aleksandr Sokurov, who was enduringly influenced by Tarkovsky, shot his elegy on a tiny Japanese island whose two sole inhabitants are aged and preparing for death. Beginning with trees, animals and objects as they emerge from the fog, the director delicately approaches his two elderly protagonists with slow, meditative camerawork and thoughtful monologues. The sounds of the natural world, citations of classical music (especially of Gustav Mahler) as well as Russian and Japanese folk music are deployed with particular care, all of them eventually merging into a tonal unity of spiritual identity. Reality becomes a spiritual landscape, a border zone between this world and the other.