Nostalghia

NOSTALGHIA   ***1/2

Andrei Tarkovsky

1983

IDEA:  With his translator, a Soviet writer visits Italy to investigate the life of a Russian composer who had been exiled in the country in the 18th century.

BLURB:  There is a sense of finality about Nostalghia that makes it, in retrospect, seem like the first part of a valediction culminating in Tarkovsky’s final film, The Sacrifice, three years later. In fact, the film signals the end in its opening passage: in black and white, three figures drift across foggy countryside, before their movement - and the durational movement of the shot itself - suddenly expires. The credits roll. Tarkovsky will return frequently to this hazy monochromatic else-when, soon understood as the Russian motherland to which writer Gorchakov can never return. The loss represented by these bucolic snapshots forms the nostalgia of the title, shaping Tarkovsky’s psychospatial evocation of exile, memory, and spiritual yearning. Repeating the dislocation of Sosnovsky, the 18th-century composer he’s come to research, Gorchakov wanders through ancient Italian baths and crumbling buildings a lost man, alienated from the modernity of his female translator, sparked alive only at the memories of home that come trickling into his consciousness like leaks in a roof. As in so much of his work, Tarkovsky fills Nostalghia with water, tempting the viewer to interpret life-giving properties and annihilating formlessness, excess and disarray. Such volatile qualities become embodied by the decaying home and doomsaying disposition of Domenico, the mad revolutionary who adds to water a flame of literal self-immolation. He is another side or potential of Gorchakov, another realization of the tragedy of Sosnovsky, an anguished consciousness wishing for a return to some speciously unified past Tarkovsky refuses to define. Tellingly, the director answers Domenico’s self-destruction with Gorchakov’s sacrificial absolution, carried out in a breathtaking long take that merges corporeal labor with spiritual transcendence. His faith and endurance literally keep the flame alive. If temporal irrevocability largely consumes Nostalghia, then so too does immanent sublimity. As Gorchakov sits with dog, Tarkovsky pulls back to reveal a nesting of past and present, Russia and Italy, the secular and the sacramental. Snow falls. And unlike the movement of the first shot, it doesn’t stop.