The Mirror is a stunning mixture of dream and autobiography, mystical and physical imagery, black-and-white and color, from the most poetic and inventive of contemporary Soviet directors, Andrei Tarkovsky. A film about memory--individual and collective--it sketches Tarkovsky's youth through dream images of a young boy who is hypnotized in a clinic in an attempt to cure a chronic stutter. At the center of his memories is a woman, mother and wife in one figure, alternately played by Margareta Terekhova and L. Tarkovskaya, the director's mother. The story moves from a pre-war rural setting through the Stalin era, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II.