Father and Son

A father and his son Aleksei live together in an attic flat in St Petersburg. The mother is dead. The closeness between the two of them is outside ordinary measure: they wrestle, they listen to each other's dreams, they sit up on the roof. Aleksei is at military school. He has a girlfriend, who works out that she cannot compete with this household and leaves. The boy dreads the day he will be separated from his father. Very little happens in the film; everything that does concerns how close two people can stand to each other. Aleksandr Sokurov directs; ninety-seven minutes. It is taken as a companion to his Mother and Son of 1997. It won the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes in 2003. The film was read as carrying a homoerotic subtext, a reading Sokurov rejected.