Sublime Slapstick: The Divine Comedy of Andrei Tarkovsky

A still from Stalker (1979)

The works of Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky are something of a prized carcass from which all high-art worshipping, culture vultures desire desperately to peck.

With a small but meaty backlog of seven features over three decades, the moustachioed God-botherer has gained a reputation as a curator of the sublime. Working beneath the shadow of the atheistic USSR, his stories were the confessions of a man of deep, Roman Orthodox faith who wielded cinema as a gentle weapon against an oppressive and demystified Soviet world. Never one for modesty, his work sought to elbow itself alongside the early Renaissance masterworks of the Christian canon. His final film The Sacrifice (1986) — made in Sweden following his exile from the Soviet Union— opens on a still of Da Vinci’s The Adoration of the Magi, an unfinished canvas with which Andrei was entering into dialogue, perhaps even implying he would complete. References to Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow appear in three of his films; 1975’s Mirror, ‘72’s Solaris and, my personal favourite, Andrei Rublev (1966). Just to hammer home this well-flattened point, the entirety of the latter film is a three-hour tribute to its namesake, a real-life Russian icon painter into whose gold-tinged oeuvre Tarkovsky’s camera dives for the film’s finale — parting with its black and white cinematography in order to initiate a leap into religious ecstasy that is both Kierkegaardian and Wizard of Oz-like. A sequence at once philosophical, devout yet truly cinematic.

Tarkovsky’s style is associated best with the word monumental. His films are cinematic sepulchres. Cathedrals in motion. Moving frescoes sculpted out of time and filmstock itself. In Andrei’s worlds, monks slope through boggy Rus searching for artistic inspiration. Mad prophets immolates himself on the plinths of statues. Scientists on spacecrafts attach strips of paper to air vents to recreate the sound of wind. His characters yearn, call out to the divine, seek salvation. Given this reputation then, it is perhaps surprising that there are so many moments in Tarkovsky films which are downright clumsy. People fall over, drop stuff, smack their shins on things. It is this incongruous intrusion of pure farce, what I will term ‘sublime slapstick’, that Geoff Dyer called out as “those comic moments for which Tarkovsky is absolutely unrecognised” in his Tarkovsky-tribute Zona.

It is in these moments, these Pythonesque lapses into idiocy, when the holy men that helm Tarkovsky’s canvases are suddenly made to look like complete idiots. His Christs become clowns. His hermits become fools. His priests turn into prats. What explains this apparent paradox? How could such an austere and committed archivist of man’s godliness engage in the sort of gaggery you expect to find in an Adam Sandler flick?

Sandlerov; Tarkovsky’s true rival…

Let’s attempt the hattrick and return to The Sacrifice once more. The Tarkovskian paradox is perhaps best epitomised by the particularly odd conclusion to a breath-taking dream sequence. The perfectly sane set-up is as follows; Alexander, a retired actor inhabiting a country house in Bergmann-land (the film was set on the Swedish director’s favourite island), must copulate with a witch in order to offset an impending Nuclear apocalypse. The series of shots following Alexander’s sacrificial infidelity are breathtaking, and far better witnessed than described. Though describe them I shall.

First, the witch and her reluctant lover levitate above a bed. The camera cuts, panning across a scene of rapture-like devastation, a courtyard of falling glass through which refugees in rags charge, in panicked slow motion, across a ruined city. A sleeping baby is revealed lying on a layer of glass. Then, a cut to the almost prelapsarian image of Alexander’s redhaired and naked stepdaughter, chasing chickens out of the house like an Eve tending to her Eden. Finally, our quasi-hero wakes in his living room, realising he, and all humanity, are still very much alive. He walks across the room and, as if to welcome himself back to the world, immediately bonks his shin against the old piano. Ouch.

This isn’t the only moment like this in Tarkovsky’s austere and, perhaps, least accessible final work. Alex’s wacky mate, Otto, is the veritable Mr Bean of the piece. Physical gags include his bike dropping to the floor after he delivers a canvas to the house and a particularly ludicrous moment when he dramatically falls over in the living room. Alexander himself, long after his quickie with the Witch, also takes on a distinctly Bean-like persona. Following the grand piano gag, he spends the rest of the film limping around in a ludicrous dressing gown, hiding from his family, falls over one more time (for luck) then proceeds to ineptly burn down the house with Tarkovsky refusing to cut away, even as the first couple of matches fail to catch (this, I must say, having sat through two hours already, very much drained what was left of the patient reserves…).

The Sacrifice is not the only work to which this monumental farce is limited. In Andrei Rublev, the camera lingers on a oddly tender and humanizing moment of comedic hubris during a violent raid. A marauding Tartan horseman charging toward his conquest suddenly falls into the river before being fished out, grinning at his own idiocy. In fact, like Sacrifice, there’s an awful lot of falling over in Tarkovsky’s medieval masterpiece. Two men are seen drunkenly laying into each other outside a peasant hut before falling into the mud. The first time young Boris the bellmaker is introduced to the audience, he falls over, face-planting transcendentally into the soil. The film’s opening sequence, in which a crackpot inventor evades the medieval state’s security apparatus to rebelliously launch a hot air balloon off a church steeple, breaks into a moment of transcendence — a medieval man in flight — before the inevitable fall to earth. It is this fall which kicks off all three hours of ensuing action…

Then there is the opening sequence of Tarkovsky’s most dreamlike and personal piece, 1975’s Mirror. Anatoly Solonitsyn (playing a fictionalised version of Tarkovsky’s poet father) approaches Tarkovsky’s fictionalised mama, sat brooding dejectedly on a fence like all good Soviet gals. The gregarious poet settles next to her, breaks the flimsy wood and sends them both tumbling onto the grass in laugher. It’s an exquisite moment. As comedic as it is touchingly beautiful.

So, what is the purpose of Tarkovsky’s surprising indulgences into often slightly lame sight-gags? Is it simply comic relief? A way to break up the notoriously slow pace of his masterworks? Anyone who has experienced a full runtime of his will know the high priest of Cinema had absolute no time for such blasphemies of ‘keeping the audience engaged’, ‘entertainment’ or, most sinful of all, ‘plot.’ Rather, sublime slapstick is a crucial component of his religio-cinematic thesis. A way for Tarkovsky to remind us that we are flawed humans. Jesters and clowns to the eyes of god. We are no longer in Eden. We have fallen. And will continue to fall, over and over until we leave our earthly realm.