Mother and Son is a slow and enigmatic, soft and sad poem about the last days of a mother weakened by disease. Her loving son looks after her, helps her and feeds her and takes her along on local walks. The whispering of the wind and other natural sounds in the surroundings are reminiscent of violin glissandi. Memories are accentuated by a few nostalgic sounding chords. The carefully composed images are reminiscent of the work of the Germany romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. The landscapes portrayed suggest the silent mystery of the son’s suffering. No violence, no shouting, only the slow passing of time are at the heart of this unique film. A serene beauty slowly emerges. Sokurov: ‘In this relationship between mother and son, only love is important – the love that is so serene that nothing else has to exist.’The minimal actions in Sokurov’s visual elegy are given plenty of space to ‘breathe’. Anamorphic lenses provide strange pictures in which characters and the surrounding nature melt into one. Seldom has a film made nature so tangible (the film was shot in co-production country Germany). Sokurov seems to penetrate increasingly profound humanist and religious layers in his films. Mother and Son is one of the masterpieces of 1997.
