The Color of Pomegranates (1969)

There's a particular type of film that critics adore and regular audiences quietly endure, and The Colour of Pomegranates might be the purest example of that divide I've ever sat through. I came to it with genuine good faith. Sergei Parajanov's reputation precedes him, the film is genuinely revered in serious cinephile circles, and I'm not someone who needs explosions and car chases to stay engaged. But seventy-five minutes later, I was less enlightened than I was relieved it was over.

The film presents itself as a loose, dreamlike portrait of the 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova, though "portrait" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. There's no narrative to follow, no dialogue worth speaking of, no character you can actually latch onto. What you get instead is a succession of meticulously composed static tableaux: figures draped in robes, pomegranates bleeding their juice onto white cloth, fabric drifting in slow motion, symbolic gestures arranged and repeated like religious iconography. It is, I'll grant you, visually arresting. Every single frame looks like a Renaissance altarpiece someone has pulled down from a church wall and coaxed into movement. The colour is extraordinary, rich and saturated and deliberate. Parajanov clearly had an eye that borders on the visionary.

But here's my problem. Striking images, arranged one after another without story, without emotional momentum, without any real way in for the viewer, stop being cinema and start being a slideshow. A beautiful slideshow, fine, but a slideshow nonetheless. I kept waiting for something to pull me forward, some reason to care what came next, and it never arrived. The symbolism is so dense and so specific to its cultural and religious context that without a scholarly guide sitting next to you, much of it simply washes past. I don't mind working hard at a film. I minded feeling like the film had no particular interest in meeting me halfway.

I've wrestled with similarly challenging and formally radical films before. I found real rewards in Persona, for instance, a film that is equally strange and alienating in places but never stops feeling alive, never stops feeling like there's a beating human heart somewhere underneath the abstraction. The Colour of Pomegranates doesn't give me that. It's inert in a way that feels less like tranquil meditation and more like a film that has simply decided it doesn't need you. And maybe it doesn't. Maybe it was made for other artists and scholars to admire and dissect. That's a legitimate artistic position. It's just not one that makes for a particularly enjoyable ninety minutes of your evening.

The word "poetic" gets thrown around a lot in defence of films like this, and I'd push back on that. Poetry, good poetry, creates feeling. It finds a way through imagery and rhythm and sound to make you feel something you couldn't quite put into words before. This, for me, didn't do that. It felt more like an exercise: formal, controlled, impeccably crafted, and almost entirely cold. There's a difference between a film being slow and contemplative and a film being simply boring, and I know which side of that line this one landed on for me.

I want to be clear: I'm not dismissing Parajanov's talent, and I'm not saying the film is badly made. It demonstrably isn't. The craft is there, the vision is there, and I understand completely why serious film scholars place it where they do in the canon. Importance and enjoyability are just not the same thing, and I've grown tired of pretending otherwise. Some films earn their reputation by being genuinely wonderful to watch. Others earn it by being significant. This is the second kind.

Two stars. Respect where respect is due. But I won't be rushing back.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 1969  | Watched: 2026-03-11

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Rent: Pijama Films
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More from the 1960s: Viy (1967) · Persona (1966) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · Daisies (1966)
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