Classical Plus Father & Daughter - Mother & Son 2

Father and Daughter, Mother and Son

It turns out there's a whole family of stories about children trying to see their parents clearly, and parents trying to be forgiven, or understood, before it's too late... Take Rembrandt: he painted one of them, the prodigal son, kneeling, home at last, in the arms of a father who forgives him, though for how long, who knows? Or Bergman's daughter, the wonderful writer Linn Ullmann herself, who wrote a book trying to understand her genius father, the director, as his mind slowly left him. Or Tarkovsky, in his film, who gave us a hero invisible on screen, wrapped up in old grievances and a reckoning with his mother, tormented by guilt, unable to find peace, returning again and again to... the mirror of the past. Sokurov, on the other hand, in his "Mother and Son," gives us something quite opposite: an almost unbelievable tenderness and closeness with a mother, held in the last moments of her life...

Curious, which of these scenarios would we actually choose, in our real lives? Or, failing that, in the one we quietly imagine for ourselves at night?