Krug vtoroj

THE ONLY REAL EVENT IN THIS FILM is a young man's journey to a small village in coldest Sibiria to make arrangements for his father's funeral. Next to his dead father's body the young man is confronted with death in all its shapes. Ascetic minimalism is mixed with a documentary style and creates a many-levelled metaphorism._
COMMENT:
A YOUNG MAN IS ABOUT TO BURY his father. For several days he lives together with the corpse in a cold and run down apartment. Physicians and undertakers come and go. Snow is falling in the room, through the roof. The son is smoking his father's cigarettes. All water pipes are frozen. The corpse has to be cleaned outside in the snow. Industrial smoke shrouds the winter landscape. There are no longer any colors ...
Alexander Sokurov's The Second Circle is close to unbearably austere with its probing bead-roll esthetic: there is no redemption here, besides possibly the few glimmers of absurdist humour. Sokurov has drained his film of nearly all sentiment and symbols (in case you don't prefer to view the prolonged funeral rite as a symbol of the Soviet Union, a collective exorcism ... What then is leftl
A ''documentary'' portrait of a reality that could be ours, and might already have been ours? Death as absolute zero, that which no work of art has been able to tell and only manages to approach. Sokurov himself says that his art is a way of preparing man for death. The Second Circle is maybe an official declaration of death over everything old, to scrutinize it as minutely as possible and then, paradoxically, with the help of that, cross it over and continue: an existential break-point for the young Maljanov (he has the same name as the protagonist in Days of Eclipse)? In that case we're back in the symbolic domain, maybe inevitable after all, even though this film appears to have been created so much with the help of dumb things, the wordless, non-communicative. It's tempting to say, with the help of death himself.
Loss or liberation - what is the one and the otherl (How to separate the twol) Fathers die in Sokurov's films, fathers and illusions: Tarkovsky in Moscow Elegy, love in Anaesthesia DoIorosa, the dream of another life in Save and Protect, personal life-lies in the master piece Days of Eclipse. Alexander Sokurov is an inversion of Andrei Tarkovsky in much: Tarkovsky fills out, builds up, gives hope, teaches and pronounces truths, whereas Sokurov breaks down, takes apart, undermines, forces significance out of Meaning's illusory sphere. Lies, feelings, life itself are put out - no other film maker, besides maybe Antonioni, does this as consequently as Sokurov. The people in Sokurov's films are abandoned by their loved ones, by their modi vivendi, and, in death, by themselves. The rest, whatever finally is left in The Second Circle, is maybe then the meaning of non-meaning, a refusal, a liberating estrangement contained in the gaze itself. Life - and death - are not meaningless phenomena for Sokurov. Only meaning itself is.
CARL·JOHAN MALMBERG

Medverkande
Peter Alexandrov, Nadeshda Rodnowa, Tamara Timofejewa: Producent
Grigori G. Nikulin: Manus
Yury Arabov: Foto
Alexander Burkov: Musik
Olivier Nussio: Talat språk
Russian