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Nostalghia
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s first film made outside of the USSR, a Russian intellectual conducting research in Italy becomes overwhelmed by a melancholic longing for home. Winner of three awards at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, his late masterpiece is a mystical and mysterious collision of East and West, shot with the tactile beauty that only Tarkovsky can provide.
Andrei Tarkovsky explained that in Russian the word “nostalghia” conveys “the love for your homeland and the melancholy that arises from being far away.” This debilitating form of homesickness is embodied in the film by Andrei (Oleg Yankovsky, The Mirror), a Russian intellectual doing research in Italy. He becomes obsessed with the Botticelli-like beauty of his translator Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano), as well as with the apocalyptic ramblings of a self-destructive wanderer named Domenico (Erland Josephson, The Sacrifice). Written with frequent Michelangelo Antonioni collaborator Tonino Guerra (L’Avventura) and newly restored, NOSTALGHIA is a mystical and mysterious collision of East and West, shot with the tactile beauty that only Tarkovsky can provide. As J. Hoberman wrote, “Nostalghia is not so much a movie as a place to inhabit for two hours.”