I now reach the point in “Mirror” where I feel not only my descriptive powers fail me, but my observational ones as well.

It’s a series of three scenes stacked on top of one another, the first in color, the second in black and white, the third again in color. They all focus on a house — the family house, where Alexi’s father was born, the one he called his grandfather’s house.

At least that is what we hear in the poem that comes to us in voiceover during the first dream segment. In it, we see the log-lined walls of the house and its dark interior, and a family inside — but no father. Once again, there is a man narrating about life inside a house, but he is not there enlivening it.

It’s impossible to tell which “Mirror” timeline this fits into — or even if the concept of timelines is relevant in this film. The same actress plays the mother and the ex-wife … the children are hard to tell apart. All we know is that these are scenes of domestic life and the narration speaks of dreams, of a house he remembers, but cannot enter.

Tarkovsky plays this trick on us where the non-dream scenes are in black and white, white the dream sequences are in color. So was that the dream sequence? And if it was the father’s dream, what does that do to Tarkovsky’s self analysis that this film is about his mother? Why then is the mother inside someone else’s dream?

We exit out of this sequence into black and white and some of the most gorgeous shots of the film — wind swept Russian forests, springtime, punctuated with a snowstorm of flowering tree buds. We are again unsure who is experiencing this view, but it seems to come to us from a child’s point of view.

Then we enter the only narrative scene of this section — Alexi and his mother arrive at the house where they once lived. They wish to go inside and speak to the new owner. They aren’t particularly courteous guests — Alexi for some reason hasn’t worn shoes and enters the house with bare, muddy feet.

The mother explains that they live in Moscow, but the city is now being bombed regularly, so they have taken a room outside the city as refuge. The mother seems to have something she wishes to talk to the home owner about. But the camera is not interested in her discussion.

Instead it follows Alexi as he wanders, coming upon milk dripping from a table onto a floor. And then he sees himself in a mirror.

Alexi catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror seems to change the weather system of the film. He becomes transfixed by the beauty of the image, not just of his face, but how the mirror catches the light and how the changing light patterns behind him alter the visual perception of him … he seems to shift from mysterious to saintly purely through the drift of light.

And there are more mirror images here — a mirror burning in a flame, then a young woman captured both directly on camera and via her mirrored reflection.

Do I know what these images mean? Of course not. But the feeling that comes up is that Alexi has an epiphany in this moment, and in the beauty captured by the mirrors he glimpses his future, a future devoted to capturing beauty with a camera.

What his father captured in words, he will craft with visual poetry. It’s more divinely inspired art, the only kind Tarkovsky comprehends. And it happens because his mother takes him to his ancestral home for reasons we will never hear.