Nostalghia

1983 candle commercial

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A Russian poet makes a new friend in Italy and struggles with keeping his candle lit.

No idea what this movie's actually about, but it sure is pretty. Lovely extended scenes, great Tarkovskyian landscapes, time and time and time. Paced like a dead man's brain queef, stuffed with enigmatic symbols, effortlessly bouncing between dream and flashback and everyday listlessness.

The climactic scene--and this is probably a spoiler--is an intense action sequence featuring the main character trying to walk a lighted candle from one side of a drained spa to another. It's around ten minutes of unbroken dreary metaphor. Is that life--trying to carry a lighted candle from one side of a pool to the other? If not, should it be?

The first shot in this is beautiful, and I got to wake my wife up by saying "Slug bug" and slugging her. I had no choice because rules are rules. The fog is impossible, rolling in as quickly as the plot develops. The final shot, fittingly another of those extended shots where the camera zooms out on a character and a dog for the amount of time that it needs to, is almost beautiful enough to stop your heart. Everything in between? Well, all that is stunningly beautiful, too, from a mother prayer ending in an eruption of birds, to a floating feather, to a glimpse of an angel, to an opening door revealing a Eugenia smiling in slow motion, to a crazy man's rain-filled home, to a boob, to a landscape constructed in a room that bleeds into the landscape seen through the open window, to a fog-drenched spa with a quartet of gossipers, to awe-inspiring architecture, to an insane man devouring bread in front of a mirror, to a shocking scene of self-immolation that is apparently mocked by a doppelganger. Tarkovsky paints like a poet and makes movie scenes like a God. This surprises you with just how beautiful a shot from a movie can be, and then it surprises you again by showing you something even better.

Nostalghia is as impenetrable (at least to this slightly-dumb viewer) as it is beautiful. Perhaps the title gives away that this is intensely personal, but Tarkovsky's got that gift of taking all these memories--real or cinematically manufactured, and making them the memories of his audience. The mystery is thick, but the emotions are acutely felt. It's a movie you carry in your soul.

A special call-out to Domiziana Giordano's left breast.