Rating: 5/5
Criterion Challenge 2023 | 45/52 | 1960s<blockquote>This film is not the story of a poet’s life. Instead, the filmmaker has attempted to recreate the world of a poet — the modulation of his soul, his passions, and his torments — broadly utilizing the symbolism and allegories of medieval Armenian troubadours.</blockquote> On paper, this is a biopic about poet and troubadour (ashug) Sayat-Nova. In design, it is a series of moving, living paintings.
The color of pomegranate bleeding from the sheathe of a knife. A foot crushing a cluster of grapes. A child in child’s pose, framed in stained glass, as a woman drapes blankets over them.
The child is our protagonist. The compositions are stages of his life reconstituted from the Armenian culture of the period.
I am the man whose life and soul are torment.
Lines of poetry and song pair with the images. Not a narrative but another avenue into the poet’s internal world.
Sofiko Chiaureli is a Tilda Swinton-type — their androgynous look transcends gender and readily imitates and elides it according to the scene’s needs.
I desired a shroud for the dead body. Instead, they bared the frenzied contortions of their living bodies. Where then shall I seek selfless love?
Director Sergei Parajanov’s provocation is to ignore social realism in conveying a person who lived. Like Andrei Rublev, its poetic vision did not align with the rigid framework of Stalin. It was Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood that inspired Parajanov to make films in the first place.
This film could be the most beautiful-looking I’ve seen. I would love to play a video game in which each of the levels/worlds were these tableaux.
We're seeking ourselves in each other.