This visually impressive work by writer/director Andrei Tarkovsky concerns a man nearing death looking back at his life and his place in the recent history of Russia. Ignoring traditional narrative, it is a diffuse, patchy work that resembles a scrapbook of loose clippings in need of order as the unseen protagonist reflects choppily from past to present making it difficult to grasp when and where you are at moments. Its fragmentation demands further viewings but with no guarantee of a better understanding. It is a deeply personal trip for Tarkovsky, mired in nebulous reminisce of hard times where he combines brutal newsreel footage of WW2 with powerful scenes of surreal and pastoral beauty but the disjointed style can be off putting and distracting if one is trying to make sense of something that perhaps even the author incapable of in this challenging memoir that both awes and confounds.
