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Perhaps people can be at once not only male and female but also young and old, parent and child? That might be the theme of Aleksandr Sokurov’s uncanny and polymorphously perverse second entry in a planned "family" trilogy (the first being 1997’s equally mythic, though not nearly as incestuous, Mother and Son). Sokurov has vehemently, and perhaps disingenuously, denied any taint of homo-eroticism in the film, but if anything is clear in this radiantly obscure parable, it’s that the opening naked embrace between dad (Andrei Shchetinin, who looks like a candidate for Tom of Finland), and his willowy and wiry son (Aleksei Neimyshev, more the Bruce Weber type) is not just paternal and filial. Turns out it’s only a bad dream. Or something. (And you thought The Return was cryptic!) The elliptical events and dialogue take place in a seaside city suffused in a golden, unearthly light, mostly on a roof top that looks sometimes like a set from Mary Poppins, sometimes like one from Querelle. The plot — the boy is in military school, his girlfriend is dumping him, dad’s an army vet with a troubling lung X-ray, a young man visits who is the son of dad’s war buddy — seems half-baked and distracting. Which may be the point, though I preferred the limpid simplicity of Mother and Son. Father may know best, but a boy’s best friend is his mother. In Russian with English subtitles. (84 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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