“If you didn’t care for Tree of Life then genetically you are not a human being.”–Tim Heidecker (via Twitter)

DIRECTED BY: Terrence Malick

FEATURING: Brad Pitt, Hunter McCracken, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn

PLOT:  A couple learns about the death of one of their three sons.  Then, a flashback covers events from the birth of the universe to the birth of the couple’s first son, Jack.  A series of impressionistic scenes show Jack growing up in a small Texas town, afraid of the stern father who wants to toughen him up to face life’s trials.

BACKGROUND:

• The Tree of Life may be a partial reworking of Q, a discarded Malick script from the 1970s, which was said to involve “a Minotaur, sleeping in the water, and he dreams about the evolution of the universe…“
• Producer Grant Hill recalls that when he first saw Terrence Malick’s original script for The Tree of Life, it was “a long document that included photographs, bits of material from his research, paintings, references to pieces of music.  It was like something I’d never seen or even heard of before.”
• Special photographic effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull had worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Blade Runner (1982).  He came out of retirement to work on this film at Malick’s request.
• Won the Palme D’or at Cannes in 2011 and was voted “best film” in Sight & Sound‘s 2011 poll.
• After some theatergoers asked for their money back after screenings of the movie, the Avon Theater in Stamford, Connecticut put up a poster reading, in part: “We would like to remind patrons that THE TREE OF LIFE is a uniquely visionary and deeply philosophical film from an auteur director.  It does not follow a traditional linear narrative approach to storytelling. We encourage patrons to read up on the film before choosing to see it, and for those electing to attend, please go in with an opened mind and know that the Avon has a NO-REFUND policy once you have purchased a ticket to see one of our films.”
• A shorter version of the film, featuring expanded versions of the birth of the universe sequences, is planned for a separate release as an IMAX documentary at a later date.
• Our original July 5, 2011 review rated The Tree of Life a “Must See,” but demurred that the film was not quite weird enough to merit a place on the List.  Readers disagreed, and in the 2nd Reader’s Choice Poll they voted Malick’s masterpiece be promoted to a List Candidate.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Thanks to its cosmic visuals, The Tree of Life is compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey more often than any other movie.  That should tip you off that selecting a single indelible image is no easy task.  I could cheat and include the entire twenty minute birth of the universe montage.  I could select my personal favorite image: the child in a flooded, womb-like bedroom who swims out the window to be born as a teddy bear floats in the amniotic brine.  But I believe we will be forced to anoint the “gracious dinosaur” scene as the film’s most unforgettable gambit.  It’s Malick’s “chaos reigns” moment, the juncture at which you either get out of your seat and leave the theater, or experience your first weirdgasm of the evening.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Sometimes, when you spend your cinematic time immersed in the

Original trailer for The Tree of Life

surrealistic worlds of David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky, it’s easy to forget how uncompromisingly radical and bizarre a film like The Tree of Life appears to someone whose idea of an “out there” movie is of Cowboys and Aliens.  In our initial assessment of Malick’s grandiose God picture, we concluded that “surrealism is only used as an occasional accent here; overall, the mood is more accurately described as ‘poetic’ rather than ‘weird’” while acknowledging that “[a]ny movie that tells the story of a suburban Texas boy’s troubled relationship with his father—but uses a dramatic encounter between dinosaurs to illustrate its main point—is at least making a nod towards the bizarre.”  In the months since that initial review, however, The Tree of Life‘s empyrean strangeness has continued to impress us as 2011′s best weird work.  The clincher came when co-star Sean Penn complained to the French press, “A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What’s more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.”  That’s all the endorsement we need: when a movie is too weird for its own Hollywood stars, we have to accept that it’s just weird enough for us.

COMMENTS:  A boy’s tempestuous relationship with Brad the Father is used as a metaphor for nothing less than the turmoil between man and his Maker in Terrence Malick’s moon shot of a movie.  Told mostly as a series of hazy, dreamlike domestic memories, Tree‘s primary mission is to explore Jack O’Brien’s tempestuous relationship with his domineering father (significantly, Brad Pitt’s character is only referred to in the film as “Mr.” O’Brien).  Scenes of young Jack frolicking in the spray of a DDT truck with his two brothers alternate with memories of his father trying to teach the boy to fight by popping pop in the face, and these may be followed by a shot of Sean Penn as grown-up Jack wandering in a desert dressed in a three-piece suit.  Confusing things further, Jack’s reminiscences frequently drift into childhood fantasies: an ominous tall man stoops in a chapel-shaped attic.  When the boy first encounters the facts of death, he imagines his mother as Snow White encased in a glass coffin in the forest.  His own birth is depicted as a child swimming out of a flooded bedroom.  And the movie takes time out not only for these flights of fancy, but also to visit the birth of the universe and the afterlife.

The Tree of Life branches in many directions, but there’s always a method to Malick’s madness.  The film begins with a quote from the Book of Job: God’s terse, non-responsive reply to Job’s complaints about his ill-treatment at the hands of his Maker: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”  After laying out the film’s main thesis, that “there are two ways through life—the way of nature, and the way of grace”, Malick gives Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien a good reason to complain to God: he kills their child, Jack’s brother.  After scenes of the grown-up Jack looking melancholy and lost (which are peppered throughout the entire movie), the story returns to the aftermath of that devastating death as mother Jessica Chastain asks , “Lord, why?  Where were you?”  In the most audacious cinematic answer imaginable, Malick then literally shows us the laying of the foundations of the earth: the formation of nebulae, the birth of stars, molten lava boiling, all merging into visions of the dance of cellular mitosis as the Tree of Life begins to form, a twenty minute bravura sequence ending in Jack’s birth.  As is the rest of the narrative, the scenes of life’s gestation and birth are accompanied by the heavenly choral and symphonic sacred music of Bach, Taverner, Smetana, Mahler, and a host of others; history’s most glorious music written by man to express his wonder at creation.  It is impossible not to be awed by the splendor of the universe Malick lays out before us, and it’s impossible not to be impressed by his brashness in recreating the cosmos for our benefit.

These events occupy the first third of the film, which then settles down into relative normality–considering it features the occasional unexplained shot of an ethereal Chastain floating in midair.  A central conflict soon emerges between headstrong Jack and stern disciplinarian Mr. O’Brien, who insists his son always address him as “father,” forbidding the overly familiar “daddy.”  As a boy’s mischief—tying a frog to a rocket, throwing stones through windows—develops into a dim childish awareness of sin, Brad Pitt’s Father becomes increasingly harsh towards the boy.  Family dinners turn into uncomfortable trials for the three sons, who sit in silence and answer tersely, afraid of accidentally saying something their father will perceive as disrespectful.  When Mr. O’Brien takes a business trip and is out of town for a week, it’s a holiday for the children, who spend the days blissfully romping through their Texas house with mom Chastain, playfully spraying her with a hose.  She is the embodiment of parental love, the counterbalance to Pitt’s implacable fatherly discipline.

With its “two ways through life” slogan, Tree explicitly posits Mother Chastain as the representative of Grace (love), and Father Pitt as the image of Nature (meaning, the struggle, the need to fight one’s way through life).  Pitt tells Jack, “if you want to succeed, you can’t be too good!” and “it takes fierce will to get ahead in this world.”  He teaches him to work hard, and to fight, and he’s disappointed when Jack can’t bring himself to punch Father in the face.  But his fatherly love for Jack is clear, and Jack returns that affection, if only reluctantly.  Pitt’s turn as Mr. O’Brien is the film’s preeminent performance.  Hunter McCracken does well enough as young Jack, but not much is asked of him in the acting department; Chastain is an angelic presence, but her character is one-dimensional.  Sean Penn isn’t onscreen enough, and has too little dialogue, to make a terrific impression.  Pitt is really the only complex, fully rounded character in the film, and the most fascinating both by default and by design.  He exudes toughness, but it’s tough love; his hardness stems from personal bitterness and disappointment, and from his desire for better for his children.  A talented pianist with a love for Brahms, O’Brien forsook music for a career as an engineer, and always regretted it.  He patented numerous inventions but never cashed in on them, and he envies his rich, successful neighbors bitterly.  He nearly saved a neighbor boy from drowning, but ultimately couldn’t resuscitate the lad.   As formal and authoritarian as he may be, O’Brien’s good motives and good heart are never in doubt, and Pitt makes him into a sympathetic figure instead of a mere tyrant.

The fullness of Mr. O’Brien’s character and characterization belies a simplistic Chastain=grace=good, Pitt=nature=bad equation, suggesting a second layer of Christian symbolism.  Much as the characters in Tree of Life protest to God, whose ultimate plan they can’t understand, foolish young Jack complains about his Father, not understanding that the trials Pitt puts him through are meant to make him grow as a man.  This vision fits with the traditional Old Testament image of God the Father as the loving disciplinarian, and mirrors the Job story that begins the movie (and which recurs halfway through in a sermon by the town priest on the arbitrariness of earthly justice).   In this view, Chastain’s loving mother is a feminine Christ figure, the intercessor between the judgmental Father and sinful man.  And this typology helps explain why, though we are put in young Jack’s shoes, we don’t instinctively take his side against his father; instead, we view their strained relationship as a tragedy, and yearn to see them reconciled.

That reconciliation comes in the film’s final sequence which reunites us with Penn as the elder Jack, the resentful little boy now turned into a doubtful and accusatory adult, walks through a door frame hanging in desert space onto a beach of souls where his loved ones are gathered.  It’s an ending that, in its heartrending hopefulness, is every bit as much a gamble as the cosmic sequences.  You may not agree with Tree of Life‘s religious message, but you have to admire the sincerity and passionate intensity with which Malick delivers it.  He leaves nothing on the table; he can’t be accused of stopping short of heaven.  Considering the pandering, preachy crud that passes as “inspirational” cinema these days, it’s a miracle to see a thoughtful spiritual movie that gives doubt its due, and isn’t self-servingly made to elicit “hallelujahs!” from the pious choir.  Like it or not, agree with the message or not, Tree of Life is a challenging, audacious, experimental and surpassingly beautiful work of cinema, and you’ll be better for having encountered it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an exploratory, often mystifying 138-minute tone poem that will test any Malick non-fan’s patience for whispery voiceover and flights of lyrical abstraction.”–Justin Chang, Variety (Cannes screening)

“…[a] mad and magnificent film… a rebuke to realism…there are the baffling and bizarre symphonic passages of non-narrative spectacle, prehistoric jungles, arid deserts, galaxies and spiral shapes – Kubrickian landscapes of wonder. Weirdest of all is the engorged river in which a wounded dinosaur lies prostrate…”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (Cannes screening)

“…a beautiful, messy film: at times lyrical, intimate, and uplifting; at others, vast, inscrutable, and maddening.”–Christopher Orr, The Atlantic (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE:

Fox Searchlight – The Tree of Life – News stories from the film, links, and numerous supplemental video featurettes

The Tree of Life | Two Ways Through Life – A multimedia site featuring short clips from the film

IMDB LINK: The Tree of Life (2011)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

The Tree of Life | Film | The Guardian – The Guardian shows a serious Tree of Life obsession, cataloging no less than 37 articles and reviews from its pages that reference the film (including interviews with Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt )

Brad Pitt’s ‘Tree of Life’ Sets Off Mixed Frenzy of Boos, Applause (Cannes 2011) – Hollywood Reporter account on the initially mixed reactions to the movie at Cannes

Giving VFX Birth to Tree of Life – Insight into the creation of the visual effects from the birth of the universe sequence, from Animation World Network

The Front Row: Sean Penn vs. Terrence Malick – The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody takes actor Penn to task for his comments to Le Figaro about The Tree of Life (to be fair to Penn, the report omits the actor’s qualifying statement, “it’s a film I recommend, as long as you go in without any preconceived ideas.”)

Capsule: The Tree of Life (2011) – This site’s initial capsule review of the film

DVD INFO: The Tree of Life has not yet been issued separately on DVD.  It is currently only available in a Blu-ray/DVD/digital copy combo pack (buy).  The Blu-ray disc contains the trailer and “Exploring the Tree of Life,” a thirty minute documentary, as the only extras; the DVD is completely bare.  The film is also available On Demand (rent on-demand).

FEATURING: Christina DeMarco, Greg Robbins

PLOT: A teenage girl who dreams of dancing the ballet is stricken with leukemia, and with that

diagnosis discovers she has telepathy and the power to convert the secular to evangelical Christianity.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  “You’re right… this is very weird,” writer/director/star Greg Robbins tells his cancer-ridden daughter when a gang of juvenile delinquents spontaneously profess their instantaneous love of Christ after she telepathically shows them a clip of Jesus being nailed to the cross.  But what little weirdness C Me Dance shows comes from Robbins ignoring the demands of narrative craft and instead cramming his film full of simplistic dogma and sermons.  The horrid acting, risible dialogue, laughably ineffectual Prince of Darkness and absurdly obvious theological ploys may make C Me Dance worth a few snickers, but don’t be fooled. This is a dangerous movie—a film that’s capable of destroying one’s faith.

COMMENTS: “What was the Devil’s first act of deception? Convincing humanity that he didn’t exist,” says a pastor in C Me Dance, a quote that sounds hauntingly familiar.  (Later, the movie will plagiarize The Exorcist, too: doesn’t the Bible say anything about not coveting thy neighbor’s screenplay?)  According to C Me Dance, the Devil’s second and third acts of deception were wearing various shades of colored contact lenses and hiring an extra to stand behind him with a leaf blower so his trenchcoat billows menacingly.  The movie’s shameless sermonizing and simplistic worldview results in an awkwardly didactic plot, which is only made more ridiculous by the insane decision to make a low budget, G-rated Satan the film’s literal antagonist.  The result is something like what a born again cameraman for the old “ABC Afternoon Special” might have made, if the show’s producer had allowed him to direct a single episode with half the usual budget on condition that he burn all photos of the exec bouncing on a trampoline dressed as Wonder Woman.  The acting wouldn’t cut the mustard on a tween sitcom on the Nickelodeon channel, but the mess is still watchable because it’s unpredictable: you never know exactly what wholesome inanity Robbins is about to spring on the unsuspecting viewer.  The whole project is oddly conceived and embarrassingly executed, but particularly clumsy points include an inexplicable prologue where a demon-possessed trucker runs down future teen dancer Sheri’s mom, a montage of happy girls shopping for cosmetics at the mall scored to mind-numbing Christian rock, God’s appearance in a burning chandelier, and a chaste “rape” scene where the attacker is so overcome with viscous lust that he gently rubs his victim’s head into the grass.  Along the way we’re treated to such memorable dialogue as “this is really going to tick of the Devil,” “every single day, God’s creation is going to Hell, and it’s really starting to piss me off!,” and “Hell?  What would you know of Hell, creature?”  As bad as the movie is in every respect—acting, special effects, dialogue—what’s really striking is the absence of any conflict.  The movie’s bound by its fundamentalist dogma, so the Adversary is totally impotent against the Saved; he can’t do more than stand around and yell “boo!”  Victory is foreordained, so there’s nothing at stake in this less-than-cataclysmic battle between good and evil.  The script can’t acknowledge the existence of legitimate religious doubt, so the conversions are weak and meaningless.  None of the characters undergo any soul-searching or spiritual torment; Sheri simply touches someone and boom! a new Christian solider is enlisted.  The idea of a cancer-ridden, fresh-faced teen messiah who flips the world’s switch from the “unsaved” to the “saved” position is so simple, you have to wonder why Robbins thought of the strategy before God did.  No one in the movie is at all bothered by metaphysical concerns or the problem of Evil, but you may be; after all, how could an omnipotent, loving God allow C Me Dance to actually play in theaters?  This screed is more likely to lend ammunition and comfort to scoffers than to the faithful, but despite its incompetence, the sincerity on display makes it kind of charming.  This is the kind of movie Ed Wood might have made if he’d worn religion on his sleeve, instead of angora.

Writer/director/producer/star Greg Robbins and his company Uplifting Entertainment also produce the Christian sitcom “Pastor Greg” and other unseen television programs.  The Rev. Donald Wildmon called C Me Dance “a wonderful and intense movie that needs to be seen,” while warning that the movie is only suitable for those over 13 due to “intense content” (!)

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“They say God works in mysterious ways … none have been more bizarre, more baffling in their sacrosanct ridiculousness than C Me Dance (yes, that’s the actual title).”–Bill Gibron, Pop Matters (contemporaneous)

Rarely do classic films live up to the hype.  Throughout the 1970s numerous books whispered about this lost film.  It was very common to read its being compared to a fugue.  Several veteran critics lamented its loss, something akin to losing a sacred relic.  Only the loss of Von Stroheim’s uncut Greed inspired as much passion.

Then, in the early 1980′s a near mint condition print was found in the closet of an Italian mental institute.  When it was finally made available, many, myself included, bristled with excitement, wondering if this film was everything it was said to be.

Regardless of how much you’ve read about The Passion of Joan of Arc, nothing prepares you for it.  By the time the credits roll, the viewer feels emptied, literally drained. It is that devastating, as an emotional, spiritual, ecstatic, and aesthetic experience.

Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is an essential, time-defying, inimitable cinematic experience of (German) Expressionism and (French) avant-garde.  The producers had wanted something else altogether, but Dreyer’s film was taken directly from Joan’s trial transcripts.  This is not Joan the warrior, but a young, frightened uneducated girl, absorbed in an ecstatic religious experience and a terrifying, inevitable martyrdom.

The performance of this Joan of Arc, as portrayed by Maria Falconetti, is the single greatest acting that has ever been imprinted, seared, burned, into celluloid.  But, this could hardly be called acting in any traditional sense.  Rumor has it that, in certain scenes, Dreyer made Falconetti kneel on hot coals to obtain the right expression of suffering, and Falconetti certainly was in abject misery for the hair cutting sequence (Dreyer’s reputation as a tyrannical dictator, ironically a bit like Joan’s judges, was well earned, but he made the rare gesture of presenting his actress with a bouquet of flowers after that heart wrenching scene).  Falconetti, understandably, never made another film.  It is a haunting, harrowing performance.

Falconetti and Dreyer relentlessly violate the viewers’ personal space, so much so, that one feels tortured, right along with Joan.  The British censors were certainly affected; they banned the film upon its release.  In the film, Joan’s English accusers provoke varied, intense emotions, although they are not depicted as two-dimensional personifications of evil.

Despite overwhelming empathy for Falconetti’s Joan, Dreyer directs with admirably objectivity.  At times, Joan does indeed seem on the fringed edge of sanity, so ethereal, so spaced out, that we can, at least, have some understanding of the nervous fear she she inspires in the medieval mindset of her judges.  But, Dreyer’s theme of a saintly woman would also be repeated prominently in both Day of Wrath (1943) and Ordet (1955), and one suspects a heated obsession behind Dreyer’s cool-toned facade.

Passion, like all of Dreyer’s films, has a Rembrandt-like quality in every frame (Day of Wrath took this quality to an exquisite extreme).  Rudolph Mate’s expressionistic cinematography cannot be underestimated and volumes of books could probably be written about every single shot.

Passion may be one of the ugliest films ever made, but it is necessarily ugly, a bit like the necessity of Picasso’s hideous “Guernica.” Crusty fingernails, nose hairs, sweat, bushy eyebrows,  and oily pores abound in the penetrating, dirty close-ups.  The only “pretty” face in the film belongs, ironically, to the legendary avant bad boy Antonin Artaud.  Artaud, as the sympathetic monk, Massieu, is so young, so beautifully sensuous,  that memories of the later, greasy Artaud, fresh from the asylum, madly roaming Paris streets, eaten with rectal cancer, and raving ”Having done with the judgement of God” are all temporarily banished from the mind’s eye.

Despite all she is subjected to, Joan is not of a Protestant (or Pre-Protestant) mindset.  The greatest torture she receives is when she is refused the Eucharist and it is this that temporarily breaks her, so intense is her devotion.  But, Joan’s final answer is, ‘This is my church, not yours.  You are the devils who have invaded my church and the faith.  It is not the other way around.”

Joan’s conviction is so complete, so inspiring that her martyrdom leads to further slaughter of the sympathetic crowd.  The British authorities sensed, in advance, the level of veneration that would be accorded Joan of Arc.  They  repeatedly and thoroughly burned her body as to prevent the collection of her relics.  That type of fear, combined with inspired awe, was only captured once, in 1928, despite all the later films made on the subject.

DIRECTED BY: Andrei Tarkovsky

FEATURING: Oleg Yankovskiy, Domiziana Giordano, Erland Josephson

PLOT: Andrei is a Russian poet is traveling around Italy in the company of a fetching translator, researching a biography of a Russian composer who studied in Italy before returning to Russia only to drink and kill himself.  Andrei becomes homesick and bored with the project, and with life in general, until he becomes fascinated by a insane man living in a small town famous for its natural mineral baths.  The madman gives him a simple symbolic task to perform—which Andrei procrastinates in completing— then leaves for Rome on a mission of his own.

BACKGROUND:

• Tarkovsky was considered one of the finest filmmakers in the Soviet Union; he frequently ran into difficulty with the Soviet censors, however, particularly for his Christian viewpoints.  Although his films won acclaim at international film festivals, they were often shown to limited audiences in edited versions in his own country.  Work on the historical epic Tarkovsky was helming prior to Nostalghia had been halted by the Soviet censorship board because of scenes seen as critical of the state’s policy of official atheism.
• Nostalghia was the first film Tarkovsky made outside the Soviet Union.  Originally intended to be a Soviet/Italian co-production, the state-owned USSR film production Mosfilm withdrew financial support for the project without comment after filming had already begun.
• The film competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but was awarded a special jury prize instead.  Tarkovsky claimed that the Soviet contingent applied pressure to assure that the film would not be awarded the grand prize.
• Tarkovsky defected to the West soon after Nostalghia was completed, leaving his wife and son behind.  They were eventually allowed to leave the country when he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1986.  Rumors persist that Tarkovsky did not die of natural causes, but was actually poisoned by the KGB in retaliation for his defection.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  There are many fine candidates.  The scene of Andrei attempting to carry a lit candle cupped in his hand across a drained spa may stick with the viewer, if not for its symbolism, then because it audaciously continues for over eight minutes.  But the final, static, picture postcard-like composition of a Russian homestead nestled inside an Italian cathedral perhaps captures Tarkovsky’s theme the best, and is shockingly beautiful, as well.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  The fluidity between the conscious and subconscious worlds. 

Video trailer for Nostalghia

Although it’s almost always clear whether the events depicted actually occur or are imagined, Tarkovsky is much more interested in what is going on inside the heads of his alienated Russian poet and the Italian madman than in what is happening in the “real” world.  He uses strong, sometimes obscure visual symbolism and dreams to convey an affecting mood of existential loneliness.

COMMENTS:  Nostalghia can’t be approached without a word of warning: this movie is slow.  Any film whose climax consists of a man struggling to carry a lit candle from one end of a drained pool to another, carefully cupping it against the wind, seeing it blown out and relighting it and restarting his journey, for almost nine minutes of screen time, can hardly be described by another word.  Very little happens in the story; the meaning is almost entirely conveyed through visual symbols rather than action or dialogue.  Watching Nostalghia is like staring a beautiful painted canvas that very slowly morphs into a different, but equally masterful, landscape.

Anyone who is interested in movies primarily as a visual medium will want to study Nostalghia closely.  The camera pans and zooms constantly, but slowly and deliberately, absorbing every detail.  The characters themselves move through these worlds languidly, as if they’re weary and half asleep, and even their emotions seem mired in molasses: an almost expressionless Andrei slowly opens a creaking door to reveal an almost expressionless Eugenia, whose face very gradually moves out of the shadows and slowly breaks into a Mona Lisa-like smile.  Many Americans, especially younger Americans used to Hollywood movies that sustain interest through a steady stream of events and violent confrontations, will find it to be excruciating going that confirms their worst stereotypes about plotless and obscure European art movies; but, at the risk of indulging in a cliche, Nostalghia rewards the patient viewer.  The prizes are a scrapbook of poignantly beautiful images, a mysteriously satisfying sense of spiritual longing and melancholy, and mystical excursions into a subconscious realm where the weird and the irrational hold sway.

Most of the joy of the movie comes from appreciating the painstakingly assembled and lit shots, which come in three varieties: Andrei’s nostalgic black and white reminiscences of his Russian homeland, a sun-baked Italy that occasionally blazes into brilliant yellows or glows the color of blue-green algae, and a blend of the two worlds, a dim, bleached landscape drenched in shadows so overwhelming that it appears to be monochrome.  Tarkovsky moves between these three visual schemes in an extraordinarily fluid way—there are no hard cuts, no unnatural, stylized transitions.  The ease with which he moves between the color and monochrome worlds echoes the ease with which he moves between the protagonist’s interior and exterior worlds.

As an example of this fluid method, consider the way Tarkovsky handles Andrei’s dream in the Bagno Vignoni hotel.  We have already seen his fading memories of his Russian homestead, where he imagines wife and his old German shepherd romping through a gray countryside.  When he enters the hotel room it’s darkened and shadowy, almost greyscale; when he turns on one light switch, the bulb casts an unnatural pale blue light, while switching on another light reveals that the bathroom wall that looked periwinkle in the shadows is actually bright white.  By flicking various switches and opening his window Andrei changes the color scheme from color to black and white and back.  As he prepares for sleep, accompanied by the sound of rain, he switches off all the lights, invoking the monochromatic color scheme.  As the moon glow changes, causing more and more of the room to fall into inky shadows, we notice that the old dog of his memory has wandered in from the bathroom and settled at the foot of his bed.  In a few minutes we have almost imperceptibly moved from the waking world to the dreaming world, without realizing it, just as if we were falling asleep in our chairs watching the screen.  The black and white dream that follows, while beautiful, is less impressive than the way the transition was achieved.

The key scene for lovers of the weird will likely be Andrei’s trip inside divine lunatic Domenico’s lair, a ramshackle, irrational space that’s a jumbled reflection of his own mad mind.   The home, where the madman once kept his family imprisoned for years, is full of both brick-a-brack and magical secrets, though the paradoxes within are largely created by Tarkovsky’s camera.  The crumbling masonry is white and the house is full of shadows and oddly lit, with sunlight appearing on the walls in random patches, recreating the mock monochrome color scheme the director has used before.  In contrast, there is a window that Andrei and Domenico occasionally wander by that looks out on a forest of verdant green plants.  Another window forms the basis of one of the house’s visual mysteries: as Andrei enters, he views a window that looks out on a Tuscan countryside full of rolling hills.  The camera reveals, however, that there is less to the scene than meets the eye; Domenico has created a marvelous model of the landscape complete with crystalline streams, and positioned his creation directly in front of the window sill so that it seamlessly blends into the view.  In another trick, the camera, tracking Andrei’s eye, pans from the model up to the window, and as it climbs the color leeches away until the zenith of the pan is in black and white, like the gray postcard views of the Russian’s memory.  Tarkovsky deploys other illusions to disorient the viewer and create an interior dreamscape.  The camera will pan around three corners of a room, and Andrei will appear in each corner, seemingly without having moved.  A poster of a frightening baby with a large head and blank eye sockets suddenly appears on a way and fades away.  After having shot the scene so that it appears Andrei and Domenico are conversing in tight quarters, the camera pulls back to reveal that the room is actually cavernous, like a warehouse, and has a leaky thatched roof.  As a final note, notice how “1 + 1 = 1″ appears carved on a wall: it’s a sensible metaphor that Domenico fully explains in dialogue, but a sight which nonetheless appears screamingly irrational when engraved into a madman’s home, and one which is amplified because Domenico has just begun talking to his dog about his guilty conscience as the equation comes into view.  The scenes inside this sanctuary produce a subtly jarring impression of benign madness.

Three other standout scenes deserve mentioning. The first striking image in the film occurs in a cathedral where women pray to an effigy of Madonna for fertility and rip open her torso to free a flock of small birds.  In the second, a homesick Andrei drinks vodka and wanders into an extraordinary, half-flooded ruins covered in green algae, where you can almost smell the stagnant water. There he delivers his finest monologue of the film: a drunken speech to a little Italian girl. (In fact, this is virtually the only scene where stoic Andrei shows any visible emotion).  Finally, the immolation scene, after Domenico has delivered his mad speech to the people of Rome, from atop the famous equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, set to the distorted strains of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—coupled with the bizarre reactions of the assembled spectators—is also likely to burn itself into the viewer’s memory.

If there is one complaint, besides the often overly deliberate pace, it’s that it’s difficult to know what to make of Eugenia.  Her character is constantly unsatisfied.  She cannot understand the devout women who pray to the Madonna of Childbirth, or even bring herself to kneel respectfully at the church.  She haughtily rejects the sacristan’s reactionary idea that women are fulfilled through motherhood, but offers no view of her own to counter that notion.  She is frustrated in her unrequited love for Andrei, and ends up with a powerful man who ignores her.  While the other two main characters are granted a climax to their story arcs, her final act is to go out for a pack of cigarettes (the movie has previously impressed upon us that smoking is a non-act, a waste of time).  Perhaps she exists to only show the alienation of the modern European from her own culture.  Still, she emerges as an unfulfilling character as well as an unfulfilled one; given the amount of screen time Eugenia is given and the heart Domiziana Giordano puts into the role, it seems a shame to leave her character so unexplored.

Like Eugenia, Andrei is also unsatisfied throughout most of the movie.  He begins by saying “I’m tired of seeing these sickeningly beautiful sights,” and progresses to “I’m bored.”  He is in the grips of nostalghia throughout, but he is also simply world-weary, suggesting that his homesickness is not merely for Mother Russia, but for his spiritual home.  He seems to be surprised, and a bit sad, when a little girl tells him she is happy to be alive.  He does not seek to return home, at least not until the very end of the movie.  It’s unclear why he procrastinates in completing the ritual as he promised Domenico, or what he does after he parts from Eugenia, other than drink and dream.  It’s also unclear how, and even whether, carrying the lit candle across the bath brings him redemption.  The symbolism is unforced and open-ended, but carrying the candle to the other side, struggling to keep it lit, suffering false starts and having to begin all over with a new strategy suggests the journey of a life from birth to death.

The final shot, of Andre and his dog reclining in front of their homestead, now nestled inside the outdoor nave of San Galgano Abbey, is beautiful, but I find it ambiguous.  It suggests that those two worlds—the Italian and the Russian, the material and the spiritual—that Andrei has been unable to synthesize, or to translate, have finally been merged.  But the film’s overall tone, up until its final seconds, fills us with such visions of melancholy beauty—a sense of longing that never quite slips and falls into despair or rises to hope–that it’s hard to experience this final, quiet image as a triumphant transformation, or to imagine that Andrei’s nostalghia has been cured by simple (or even by difficult) symbolism.  Although you can’t see Andrei’s expression in the picture, I can’t imagine him wearing anything other than the slightly pained mask he wears throughout the entire film.  The tension inherent in that final shot, which suggests a sudden burst of heavenly grace that is inconsonant with most of what has come before, gives that parting shot a great deal of power.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Mr. Tarkovsky… may well be a film poet, but he’s a film poet with a tiny vocabulary. The same eventually boring images keep recurring in film after film – shots of damp landscapes, marshes, hills in fog, and abandoned buildings with roofs that leak.”–Vicnent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Highly cerebral, beautifully realized, and symbolically obscure, Nostalghia is a cinematic abstract of spiritual hunger.”–Acquarello, Strictly Film School (DVD)

“…Nostalghia represents an important contribution to the Tarkovsky canon, containing some of the director’s most indelible images. Domenico’s self-immolation is surreal and upsetting, played out in an atmosphere that recalls the madhouse in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (the gathered crowd looks dangerously mad), and the final image, of Andrei sitting by a small model of his boyhood home contained within the arches of a ruined Italian cathedral, sums up the film’s dialectic of reality and fantasy as only a powerful image can.”–Nick Burton, Pif Magazine (DVD)

IMDB LINK:  Nostalghia (1983)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Nostalghia.com – An Andrei Tarkovsky Information Site – remarkably complete site dedicated to Tarkovsky with plenty of Nostalghia-specific content; fans of the director will become pleasantly lost here

Nostalghia @ Turner Classic Movies – no real analysis, but plenty of background information on the production

DVD INFO: I reviewed Nostalghia from a VHS copy, so the DVD information here is secondhand.

The most easily obtained version currently in circulation is an all-regions disc from South Korea (buy).  No extras are listed.  Some consumers have stated this version is identical to the discontinued Fox Lorber Region 1 edition (buy), which is still available new (at premium prices) and used.

[(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Irene.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)]