Nostalghia (1983, Andrey Tarkovsky) (Patreon)

51/100

Second viewing, last seen 2002. Tarkovsky loses me at a specific point in his career: I love (or once loved and still quite like, in the case of Andrei Rublev) his first four features, am considerably cooler on his last three. This is my least favorite, perhaps because it's ostensibly concerned with a phenomenon that I've never experienced, which doesn't so much get dramatized or explored as simply implied. Gorchakov doesn't really talk much about being homesick, and a viewer like myself, for whom Italy is no less foreign than Russia, won't necessarily think "Of course this man feels utterly out of place in this landscape"; his apparent ennui seems more likely to serve as a contrast to Domenico's fervor/madness, and that's how I struggled to interpret Nostalghia the first time, as I recall, getting nowhere worthwhile. Frankly, I still don't understand what Gorchakov and Domenico have to do with each other—those seem like separate ideas with virtually no thematic overlap. So, for that matter, does the intermittent melodrama involving Eugenia's unrequited crush (making it quite funny when Gorchakov responds to her angry monologue by just muttering "She's insane" and leaving the room). As was the case with The Sacrifice, there's no doubt in my mind that Tarkovsky has a grand design that synthesizes these seemingly disparate elements; I'm just not convinced that he's successfully communicated said design to the viewer. Though, again, I should note for the record that feeling like an alien outside of one's own country, and longing to return home in a broader national sense, isn't something that I "get" in an intuitive way, and Tarkovsky's heavily relying on just such intuition. (He considered it a uniquely Russian condition, actually, but it's not as if there aren't plenty of non-Russian cinephiles who adore this film.)

Nostalghia's purely visual astonishments compensate to some degree, but even those feel a bit reheated. Domenico's house might as well be located in the Zone, given its state of picturesque decay. (I'm now curious as to whether Von Trier saw the film prior to shooting The Element of Crime, which premiered at Cannes the following year; its most striking shot seems to have been directly inspired by Tarkovsky's Concerto for Constantly Dripping Ceiling and a Few Random Glass Bottles "Strewn" Upright on the Floor in D Minor.) The final shot never fails to blow my mind, but it's more or less the same concept that he'd used to conclude Solaris, pulling back from an inviting Russian home to reveal that it’s located...not in Russia. And while Tarkovsky starts experimenting here with disorienting use of both color and monochrome in the same frame/shot, that approach works to better effect in The Sacrifice, which doesn't feature multiple dream sequences that employ b&w as a fantasy signifier. In short, even when Nostalghia is great, it's great in ways that I prefer in other Tarkovsky films. Sadly, I'm probably too much the rationalist to be bowled over by the climactic candle-walk sequence, which requires at least some suspension of disbelief regarding the act's meaning—whether to Domenico, to Gorchakov, or to anybody else. It's admittedly more compelling to watch than somebody trying to traverse a long sidewalk without stepping on any cracks, but no less pointless, from my perspective, and hence hard to be deeply moved by, no matter how important the task seems to our hero. (See also my atheist's reaction to Silence, though this is sort of the inverse.) At a certain point, Tarkovsky, perhaps understandably, ceased to care about appealing to folks like me. Looks like that point was around 1977.