Every time I return to this film, I can’t remember its title. Yet somehow I always find it and watch it again and again…
Now, with the war in Donbas, I’m especially struck by how everything repeats itself… I’ve already written a review of the film Edge of Tomorrow on this site. These two films are essentially similar [from the same series as Groundhog Day], but their content is completely different. Edge of the Past… Wouldn’t it be better to call it…
Mirror for a Hero (1987) — a feature film by Vladimir Khotinenko based on a screenplay by Nadezhda Kozhushanaya, a fantastic parable inspired by the novella of the same name by Svyatoslav Rybas. At least that’s what Wikipedia tells us.
This film has everything. Most importantly, it has a world after the war — the Great Patriotic War. The Donbas of 1949, one day that repeats endlessly. Two heroes. They arrive here from the future, seemingly by accident. Each has their own life, their own story, and their own mission. One is a psychologist with a strained relationship with his father. His father blames him for not attending his mother’s funeral. The son clings to the hope of changing the world, altering the past, and apologizing for past mistakes. The father refuses to forgive. A biblical theme. The film begins and ends with this. The second hero is older, an engineer and miner who served time in prison for an incident at the mine. Arriving on this day, he naturally wants to close the mine, thereby preventing and changing his future. But life and the passage of time are harsh, and it turns out that changing even a single day isn’t so easy. It keeps repeating and repeating. What’s especially interesting is watching the different scenarios and reactions our heroes choose. They start from the same point, unaware of how far apart their paths will soon diverge. They get jobs. The psychologist becomes a miner. The engineer becomes an engineer. One, quickly realizing how hopeless everything is, gives up, drinks, and falls into moral and psychological nihilism. The other, Andrei — a mining engineer played brilliantly by Ivan Bortnik — embraces humanism instead… In short, there’s no need to describe it — just watch. A masterpiece! In the best traditions of Andrei Tarkovsky. The scene where the protagonist, desperate to escape this endless loop, goes to his parents’ house in despair is particularly striking. There, his mother is pregnant with him. His father is about to be taken away by NKVD agents. The protagonist sits in the car with his father and behaves naturally, as his son would. Though to others, it must have seemed insane. At the moment of his confession, the time loop finally breaks. The hero is reborn with the words, “Get out of here, son…” The miner, driven to despair and unable to take the final step — blowing up the mine that refuses to close, even at the cost of human lives — kills himself. One dies, the other is reborn. But both return safely.
One of the best films of the perestroika era. And why wasn’t it remembered sooner? A perfect film — a metaphor — just right for the site. Rich, deep, soulful, artistic, and so timely.
