It was while attending a school for air cadets that the father met his wife and bore his son, now 20. Their world looks like a sanctuary but may be a prison. Father (Andrei Shetinin) and son (Alexei Nejmyshev) live together on the top floor of an apartment house and have done so for many years since the death of their mother. A soldier's uniform is depicted in the latest style, while women's dresses and hairstyles are of the 40s, 50s and 60s. Shot in Lisbon, Portugal, Father and Son is not attached to time or place. It cannot happen in real life', and the film is 'the incarnation of a fairy tale. According to the director, 'Their (father and son) love is almost of mythological virtue and scale. Though the film feels homoerotic, Sokurov chafed at the suggestion calling it the product of sick European minds. We think these must be gay lovers, but soon discover that it is a father comforting his son after a nightmare. One is breathing rapidly the other is trying to comfort him. The film opens with the image of two male bodies in bed, their naked bodies intertwined in a rapturous embrace.
It is drenched in sunlight and bathed in a glow of greens and browns. The second part of the trilogy, Father and Son has no such ambivalence. Alexander Sokurov's Mother and Son had a sense of joy and love tempered by a setting in an ominous dark forest.
