The Mirror

Aleksei is a forty-something Soviet poet. He has a strained relationship with his mother, Masha, who raised him and his younger sister on her own in her husband/their father leaving them in 1935, the year their barn burned down. He is also divorced, he and his ex-wife Natalia who discuss the custody of their adolescent son, Ignat. He encourages her to remarry, especially if she retains custody, in he transposing his own growing up on what will happen to Ignat if he is raised by a single woman. In that transposition, he always places Natalia's face on his remembrances of Masha, especially in that growing up period. In what is a crisis in Aleksei's current life, this film is a series of his thoughts, memories, and beliefs, especially of Soviet life and his place in it, and which is often reflected in his poetry. It is presented in his stream of consciousness where one small item in what is his current thought may be what twigs him to move onto the next, which to an outsider may seem totally unrelated.