Andrej Tarkovskij
Nostalghia

The fact of being sandwiched between Stalker, one of the pillars of cinema history, and Offret, the true testament of Tarkovsky, perhaps has made this film a lesser chapter, the typical imperfect work that would go unnoticed by most. This is only partially true, because it is precisely the imperfection, or better yet, the incompleteness, that constitutes the object of reflection and one of the virtues of Nostalghia (1983): the artist, exiled from his homeland following the acclaim of Stalker, finds himself facing the inevitable feeling of nostalgia that grips all those who have been forced to give up their origins. Kundera, in his novel Ignorance, clarifies its etymology: νόστος (nostos, return home) and άλγος (algos, pain); nostalgia is nothing more than the suffering of distance, or rather, of ignorance that deepens the distances from what is far from us, distances that somehow make us incomplete. But it is not only space that divides. Nostalghia is a subtly sardonic reflection on the impossibility of bridging these distances through mere language; and this is evident from the title itself, a word with Greek roots but always pronounced by the author as if it were Russian. Communication itself is by definition an ambiguous tool, certainly capable of uniting, but too often a source of misunderstandings and insurmountable walls: cum-munus on one side, cum-moenia on the other.

In the slender story portrayed by Tarkovsky's usual ponderous direction, Andrej Gorchakov, the author's alter ego, is a Russian poet traveling through Italy to follow in the footsteps of the composer Sosnovskiy. Gorkachov is accompanied by Eugenia, a translator, and here unfolds the first duality (unresolved) of the film: the poet regards his companion’s work with skepticism, because translating always means irretrievably losing something along the way; and he therefore dreams of a world without borders, the utopia of a new Babel, an inconceivable singularity. The other duality is that which sees Gorkachov always "completed" by Domenico, the village madman who entrusts him with the crucial task of crossing the pool of Bagno Vignoni with a candle in hand. In any case, it is the poet who is the central figure, in search of a mystical and semantic restoration with the other; the dreamer, alienated, split, and finally (perhaps) reconciled.

To amplify the sense of melancholy, the environments are added, composed mostly of ruins and dilapidated houses: places where the heart cannot take root, spaces with fragile and permeable borders, undermined by a physiological incompleteness necessary to the artist's poetics. And speaking of poetics, recitations of Tarkovsky's father's poems could not be lacking, among which must be mentioned the moving Morire in levità, an elusive portrait of death (of poetry itself?). All elements already seen, of course, and indeed one might even accuse a fundamental mannerism on the directorial level; but weren't we talking about celebrating imperfection?

Like in his masterpiece The Mirror, Tarkovsky prioritizes 'subjective logic' over 'the logic of the subject': this is why his films are akin to moving paintings or poetry, rather than straightforward narratives. And if in The Mirror autobiography and the history of the homeland merged in an overwhelming, almost indistinguishable flow, Nostalghia assumes that light and intangible tone that makes it, in my opinion, the author's most intimate film; a film in which, once again, the dimension of the dream gently takes over and subserves art. In this sense, there is no true resolution at the end of the work: Domenico sets himself on fire in a frenzy, while Gorkachov, in a long sequence shot, fulfills the promise made to his new friend, walking across the empty pool of Bagno Vignoni holding the candle, the last flame of art, the last hope in the face of the condemnation of misunderstanding and oblivion. His "Sacrifice" will then be followed by that of Tarkovsky himself, a few years later; but reconciliation can already be found here, in the wonderful final shot, where dream and reality seem to converge and finally exhale a silent breath of salvation.