Mirror

Ok, this movie was a little ridiculous. First of all, I'm pretty sure one actress played two different people. I think the blond lady, I didn't catch her name but her son was Mitya, played the mother of the son we never saw and was in love with that guy too. I'm not sure what the director would try to pull with this, but it was kind of freaky. It was like the director was going after the whole myth that a guy marries someone a lot like his mother. The reason I thought she played two roles was because of one quote. It was during a black and white portion when she was talking to the guy off screen and he said something about she reminded him of his mother; that she looked just like she used too.
It present day context and social issues, that's just weird. Speaking of weird, I did not understand the scene at the newspaper presses. I kept thinking there was going to be some point to that. That maybe the article held some key issue about someone. But then I remembered that she was waiting for someone to come home; as in someone who was on the front lines of battle, per the second scene in the movie with the lady on the fence. Maybe she wanted a preview of the obituaries, or she wanted them pulled because she did not believe she was dead. The actress was freaking out like someone died, running and crying like that. But of course, it was all over some silly word. What possible word could make someone go on that emotional roller coaster? They laughed at the end of the scene. In my eyes their laughter tossed the entire scene at the newspaper shop right down the drain.
Another part of the movie that did not make much sense was the switching between black and white, and color. My first hypothesis was that the change meant a switch in time, as in black and white was future or present time (I couldn't decide which) and color was for the past tense time. As the movie went on I felt that I guessed wrong on the switch in color schemes and its significance. The more the movie went on the more I thought that the director was just being artistic with it, and by artistic I mean just doing it because he could. Now that I look back on the entire movie I feel like the color scheme was switched around in order to distance the audience from the story.
The reason I say that is because I felt nothing for a single character in the entire movie. It was as if the director wanted to put as much emotional distance between the audience and the characters as possible. I felt way more for characters in Chapaev and Ivan the Terrible Part I. As I went through the movie I felt devoid of emotion. I felt like there was nothing that brought me into the story. The acting in the movie was not the issue here either. Bad acting can ruin a movie, but the writing wasn't there.
Mirror was a story that was written using parts of life that have no connection and then throwing them together. Every event that was shot in the movie I can see happening to someone in their lifetime. It's just that a shot of the forest in the middle of the movie is just weird stuff that didn't belong.
I do have one theory, in reference to "Mirror" being the title of the movie, perhaps the movie was shot with someones memory in mind. It's someone looking in the mirror, and what they see in it are all the memories from their life (what the camera saw). I don't have much to back it up, but it's only a thought to try to explain something confusing.
This movie, in my opinion was not very good. To place this movie on the entertainment, propaganda, art triangle; this movie is so much in the art corner that it's off the chart. Most great art is at least understood on some level, so I'll classify this as "art."