Nostalghia

Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky

1983

*****

When your friends know you’re a huge film fan and you describe yourself as a cinephile, you get asked a lot of difficult questions like what’s your favorite film? Who’s your favorite actor? Who’s your favorite director? I have different answers to those questions depending on the day I’m asked but if you were to ask me which of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films I liked the most, I’m not sure I could give you an answer. It might be 1983’s Nostalgia. However, if you asked me what my favorite ending or last scene of a film is, I’d most likely say Nostalgia, particularly of Tarkovsky’s films, at the very least it’s up there in the top 5. The film depicts Russian writer Andrei Gorchakov (played by Oleg Yankovsky) who travels to Italy for the first time to carry out research on a fellow countryman, an 18th-century composer of whom over two centuries, all traces have been lost. During his stay he is struck with crippling nostalgia for his homeland, longing for an inner home, a sense of belonging, and a clash between his personal vision of the world, and the real conditions. It is semi-autobiographical to Tarkovsky's own experiences visiting Italy, and the complex, profound form of nostalgia which he believes is unique to Russians when traveling abroad. He compared it to a disease, suggesting it to be like "an illness that drains away the strength of the soul, the capacity to work, the pleasure of living", but also, "a profound compassion that binds us not so much with our own privation, our longing, our separation, but rather with the suffering of others, a passionate empathy." I have a huge problem with nostalgia personally (not the film, nostalgia itself). It’s something that can really hold you back, it is anti-progression and I often associate it with melancholy. It’s more often a downer and when you try to reclaim some of your past its often a wasted pursuit, and often an expensive one. However, there is nothing quite like the warmth you get from an old memory and when nostalgia is good, it’s really good. I’m not sure you can be much of a film fan without nostalgia. That said, there is far too much of it about these days and it is incredibly detrimental to creativity, particularly in the world of cinema. We wouldn’t have so many awful sequels and prequels if it weren’t for nostalgia. In Tarkovsky’s 1983 film we see nostalgia for what it really is and I think it is the first and last time since that it has really been explored in film. Andrei Gorchakov travels to Italy to research the life of 18th-century Russian composer Pavel Sosnovsky, who lived there and committed suicide after his return to Russia. He and his comely interpreter Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano) travel to a convent in the Tuscan countryside, to look at frescoes by Piero della Francesca, although Andrei decides at the last minute that he does not want to enter. Back at their hotel Andrei feels displaced and longs to go back to Russia, but unnamed circumstances seem to get in the way. Eugenia is smitten with Andrei and is offended that he will not sleep with her. Andrei soon meets and befriends a strange man named Domenico (Erland Josephson), who is famous in the village for trying to cross through the waters of a mineral pool with a lit candle. He claims that when finally achieving it, he will save the world. They both share a feeling of alienation from their surroundings. Andrei later learns that Domenico used to live in a lunatic asylum until the post-fascistic state closed them and now lives in the street. He also learns that Domenico had a family and was obsessed in keeping them inside his house in order to save them from the end of the world, until they were freed by the local police after seven years. Before leaving, Domenico gives Andrei his candle and asks him if he will cross the waters for him with the flame. During a dream-like sequence, Andrei sees himself as Domenico and has visions of his wife, Eugenia and the Mary as being all one and the same. Andrei seems to cut his research short and plans to leave for Russia, until he gets a call from Eugenia, who wishes to say goodbye and tell him that she met Domenico in Rome by chance and that he asked if Andrei has walked across the pool himself as he promised. Andrei says he has, although that is not true. Eugenia is with her boyfriend, but he seems uninterested in her and appears to be involved in dubious business affairs. Later, Domenico delivers a speech in the city about the need of mankind of being true brothers and sisters and to return to a simpler way of life. Finally, he plays the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth and immolates himself. Meanwhile, Andrei returns to the mineral pool to fulfill his promise, only to find that the pool has been drained. He enters the empty pool and repeatedly attempts to walk from one end to the other without letting the candle extinguish. As he finally achieves his goal, he collapses. I’ve often seen it as a sort of companion piece to Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect, or at least an interesting contrast based on a similar idea. Nostalghia, like many of Tarkovsky's films, utilizes long takes, dream sequences, and minimal story. What the director wanted to achieve, in terms of style, was to portray the soul, the memory, of Italy, of which it felt to him being there. Referring to his previous film Stalker to better explain, he describes the Zone as: "which is and is not, it is reality and, at the same time, it's a place of the soul, of memory. In the film when you see it, it is a forest, a river. That's all. But the air that circulates, the light, the rhythms, the perspectives, without distorting anything, make you feel it as an "other" place, with various dimensions, always real and, at the same time, different." Of his use of dream sequences, Tarkovsky once said that “There isn’t “realism” on the one hand, and on the other hand (in contrast, in contradiction) “dreams.” We spend a third of our life asleep (and thus dreaming), what is there that is more real than dreams?” I can’t help but agree. We dream about things in ‘the real world’ in our sleep and then spend our waking hours trying to work out what our dreams mean. When he visited Italy to begin studying the project of Nostalghia with Tonino Guerra, as they visited cities Tonino would show him Renaissance architecture, art, monuments, and he admired them, and would take notes, but what struck him the most was the sky, the blue sky, black sky, with clouds, with the sun, at dawn, at noon, in the evening. A sky, he said, is always simply just that, but a change in the hour of the day, the wind, climate, can have it speak to you in a different way, with love, violence, longing, fear, etc. Cinema, he said, can give these "ways" back to you and that it must, with courage, and honest, always starting from the real. Tarkovsky was a true poet, a master of our times. It’s why during any given project he was working on there was always someone behind him either making a documentary about him, photographing him or writing about him. Indeed, Donatella Baglivo filmed a ninety minute documentary on the making of the film titled Andrei Tarkovsky in Nostalghia, that provided a fascinating glimpse into the making of the film. The final scene is exceptional. It’s one of those jaw to the floor moments that I watch films for. No director, with perhaps the exception of Ingmar Bergman, analyzed spirituality quite the way Tarkovsky did.