Eternal Homecoming

Kira Muratova’s final film, Eternal Homecoming is a meditation upon the director’s own perspectives and approaches with respect to acting, directing, and filmmaking, in which she strips down the device of tautological repetition that often shapes her characters’ dialogues into a fundamental structuring element of the narrative. A woman is paid a visit by a classmate after many years of separation. The visitor seeks out advice—should he choose his wife over his lover? As he asks these questions, the woman struggles to understand which half of a pair of twin brothers she happens to be encountering. By re-staging a cinematic variation on Gertrude Stein’s line, “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” Muratova emphasizes the limits of repetition outside of literature. Life, she suggests, is never truly the same—it is always more than itself. At least, that is, until it is absorbed by death.