The Sacrifice

“Tarkovsky is for me the greatest,” Ingmar Bergman once said. Tarkovsky’s devastating final film — “a Faust for the nuclear age” (David Parkinson) — was made in Sweden with several regular members of Bergman’s team, including cinematographer Sven Nykvist and actor Erland Josephson (who also appeared in Nostalghia). Described by Tarkovsky as a meditation on “the absence in our culture of room for spiritual experience,” the film is set on an isolated island, where Alexander (Josephson), a distinguished man of letters, lives in seemingly idyllic semi-retirement. The apple of his eye is his young son Little Man, who represents for him the great hope of the future. That future is abruptly shattered by the outbreak of the unthinkable: global nuclear war. In desperation, Alexander makes a private vow to God: he will renounce everything — family, possessions, even speech — if somehow the world can be put to rights again. Photographed in ethereal northern light, and opening and closing with two of cinema’s most breathtaking single-take sequence shots, The Sacrifice is a masterful, elegant film of great formal rigour and intensity. Tarkovsky supervised its editing from his hospital bed; he died of cancer in December 1986. “No one else can approach his sense of the Apocalyptic. His death leaves a gaping hole in the cinema of spiritual quest” (Chris Peachment, Time Out). Colour and B&W, 35mm, in Swedish with English subtitles. 145 mins.