His stylistic methods generally demand great patience and openness from an audience. Somehow the technical feat of the single take and the variety, color, and prettiness of the images endlessly unfolding in Russian Ark rendered it more palatable to a general audience than usual. Sokorov is an avantgardist, and it's perhaps a bit of an accident that his previous film, Russian Ark, became so wildly popular with the non-Russian art house crowd. The beautiful tussling bodies and the two almost clone-like men are meant innocently as ways of showing intimacy poetically and visually. Americans are over-touchy about homoeroticism, none the less so if they're gay, and one can't question Sokorov's assertion that for him, this is a poem about parental relationships along male lines, about the son's need to break away on his own and become a man, and nothing at all about the homoerotic. There are cultural differences here: one remembers the Russian soldiers in Cartier-Bresson's Fifties photo holding hands in a museum. The director has declared himself shocked and irritated by our feeling that the content is homoerotic, and therefore incestuous. Everything in Father and Son is seen in soft focus through a pale amber/gold filter. The film begins with a manly tussle - of son and dad, naked in a bed, filmed abstractly, showing only parts of the body in grainy low light, like the lovemaking scene of the French model and the Japanese architect in the sand at the opening of Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour. The classes seem to consist of manly tussling in camouflage gear. Alexandr (Russian Ark) Sokorov's Father and Son (Otets y sin) wow! What a beautiful, dreamlike, homoerotic film, and also what a wildly self-indulgent one! A beefy man (Andrei Schetinin), a soldier, we're told, who smiles a lot and looks like Farley Granger (his acting seems to consist mostly of smiling), has a son, Aleksei (Aleksei Neymyshev), who looks like his younger brother but has broader shoulders and an even more spectacularly defined body, and who is studying medicine in military school.