Nostalgia (1983)

Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia arrives from 1983, a year in which the cinema still permitted a man to stare at a drained mineral pool for what feels like a geological era. A Russian poet, Andrei Gorchakov, wanders Tuscany researching an eighteenth-century composer, accompanied by an interpreter named Eugenia who would like very much to sleep with him. He declines. He is too busy being homesick. The film is austere, slow, and sincere, and it has no interest whatsoever in the cultural preoccupations that would arrive decades later.

The cast is Russian and Italian, drawn from the two nations the story actually concerns, and nobody in the production appears to have consulted a checklist. Eugenia is a woman of some intelligence and appetite, but the film never bothers to make her a case study in anything. Race does not enter the frame. Neither does climate, despite a great deal of weather. Domenico, the local mystic who keeps trying to carry a candle across a pool, has spent time in a lunatic asylum, and the film treats his condition as spiritual affliction, not as an identity to be celebrated or accommodated. He rages against modernity, but his complaint is with the soul, not with markets or capital.

Where the film does lean toward the pulpit is Domenico's final address, delivered from the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius to a small crowd of Romans. He speaks of brotherhood, of returning to a simpler life, and then he sets himself on fire while Beethoven plays. It is an earnest monologue, and it is heavy-handed in the way that earnest monologues tend to be. But the sermon is mystical and existential, aimed at eternity instead of at any contemporary audience. We are being lectured, yes. We are simply not being lectured about anything currently in fashion. This is a film about exile, memory, and the untranslatable, and it has the good manners to suffer in private.

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