Nostalghia

Shot in Tuscany, and co-written with the prolific Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra (known for his frequent collaborations with Antonioni, Fellini, Rosi, and the Tavianis), Nostalghia was Tarkovsky’s first film made outside the USSR, and proved to be the director’s penultimate work. While in Italy researching the life of an 18th-century Russian composer who committed suicide there, a Soviet musicologist has a sexually charged but unconsummated relationship with his beautiful translator, and meets a mysterious madman (played by Bergman regular Erland Josephson) who is convinced that the word is on the brink of Armageddon. Nostalghia is suffused with an almost overwhelming sense of longing and homesickness, and is composed of some of Tarkovsky’s most astonishing imagery. It may also be as tactile an experience as the movies have to offer. The film shared a special Grand Prize for Creative Cinema with Bresson’s L’Argent at Cannes in 1983. “Extraordinary ... Nostalghia is not so much a movie as a place to inhabit for two hours. Tarkovsky orchestrates a tortoise crawl tour through a world of fantastic textures, sumptuously muted colours, and terrarium-like humidity. This is a film that turns the spectacle of an ancient, leaky cellar ... into an image as memorable as any this century” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice). Colour and B&W, 35mm, in Italian and Russian with English subtitles. 126 mins.