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The second in Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov's trilogy of films about familial love, Father And Son begins with two bare-chested men cradling each other in bed after one of them has had a bad dream. It turns out that they are the father and son of the title, who've lived together for years since the mother's early death.
The unnamed patriarch (Andrei Shchetinin) is a retired military officer, his offspring Aleksei (Aleksei Nejmyshev) an army cadet at the local academy. But can the idealised love between parent and adult child be maintained?
With its golden-hued cinematography, whispered dialogue and dreamy editing, Father And Son - - set mainly within the confines of a rooftop apartment in a seaside city - - is a rich, stylised fable. The characters, meanwhile, are less flesh-and-blood creations than mythological embodiments of intense filial and paternal feelings. Off-puttingly opaque at times, this is still a work of considerable artistic imagination.
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