The Sacrifice
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The film The Sacrifice ("Offret") by Andrei Tarkovsky, (Sweden, 1986) was filmed when Tarkovsky knew that he was dying of cancer and it can be seen as his testament, as it recaptures motives used in several of his previous films. It also reflects Tarkovsky's respect for the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (a respect which was mutual) and since it was set in Sweden (on the island of Gotland) and featured Bergman's favourite camera man Sven Nykvist and Bergman actor Erland Josephson (both also featured in Tarkovsky's previous film Nostalghia), it has a distinct Bergmanian feel to it.
Plot
The synopsis is deceptively short: An aging psychologist/writer (Erland Josephson) with a younger actress wife, a teenage daughter and a young son (who is mute throughout the film except for the last shots) experiences the end of the world, a nuclear holocaust. This reflected the mood of the day, as also captured, but much less subtly in the US film The Day After. In despair the protagonist promises to sacrifice all he loves if only the terrible feat can be undone and to this end sleeps with a local woman whom he believes to be a witch. When he wakes up the next morning all is back to normal, and although it is never sure that all that went before was not a dream, he sets forth to give up all he loves, burning his house and checking himself into a mental hospital.
The film is more accessible than much of Tarkovsky's earlier work and features a haunting soundtrack which has three distinct pieces that stand out: The passionate aria Erbarme dich from Johann Sebastian Bach's Mattheus Passion, soothing Japanese flute music, and eerie traditional chants from the Swedish forests (in the old days farm girls used to call home the livestock from their forest pastures in this way). The camera work is slow and superb and contains all the hallmarks of Tarkovsky's and Nykvist's combined skill. In the face of death Tarkovsky left the world with his conviction laid down in this film, that it is the lack of spiritual values that threatens our existence. Poignantly, the first words the little boy in the film utters, in the final shot, are: "In the beginning was the word..."