Images from any Andrei Tarkovsky film might haunt your memory and imagination forever—if you first shut down the twitching, agitated pace and sensory overload of contemporary life, putting yourself in a mental space where you can become one with the film. Tarkovsky can’t be watched carelessly; his movies aren’t backdrops for a night with a tub of popcorn. They are epic in their emotional scale, even when the scope of action, as in Nostalghia (1985), is relatively confined. In other words, time spent with Tarkovsky is akin to checking into a monastery for two hours—a place where a mental vow of silence is observed.
Tarkovsky was barely tolerated by the Soviet movie bosses. Nostalghia, his second last film, was his first completed in exile from his Russian homeland. The protagonist, Andrei, obviously stands in for the director as a Russian intellectual conducting research in Italy, feeling at odds yet fascinated by the country while filled with melancholy longing for the past. He has a flirtatious, testy, ultimately hostile relationship with his Boticelli-like Italian translator, yet Nostalghia is not a story of failed romance but a quest for the ineffable, the sublime, a journey into a mystic zone suggested by the mad, sullen Italian man who has locked himself away in a ruined house, preparing for the Apocalypse.
Nostalghia is filmed in color and in black and white, with the latter indicating memory or dreams of things lost or impossible. The camera seems to hover with a concentrating eye—not the eye of God but the eye of an observant local entity who views the affairs of men and women with dispassionate distance.
With an utterly unconventional narrative and acute attention to sound (every drop of water could be the Big Bang against the abyss of nothingness), Tarkovsky was among the great art house filmmakers of his era. Since then, only David Lynch and Lars von Trier come close to making film as challenging to the narrative norms of cinema. Nostalghia is out on Blu-ray.
