FEATURING:  Matt Mulholland

PLOT: A depressed cabaret singer and sometime mime, overwhelmed by the pressures of

life and loneliness, contemplates suicide and drifts off into a symbolic abyss of despair.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  As devastating a portrait of human despair as has ever been painted, on a canvass black as velvet, this  poison break-up letter to a cruel world from an embittered heart compresses into a mere three minutes an agony that  it would take a lesser artist four minutes or even more to convey.   

COMMENTS: The nameless singer, dressed in black, observes the camera from a skewed angle, indicating his unwillingness to face the world head on anymore.  Alone, he sings of the pressures of ordinary life, but as the tension and anxiety build, a doppelgänger (who will later moph into a trippelgänger) appears.  The ghastly mirror image both harmonizes with, and mocks, the protagonist as he agonizes over paralyzing alternatives, eternally unable to choose (“which one can I take?”).  The minimalist set dissolves into a series of melancholy reminiscences; the dateless singer hanging his head in front of the mirror (the recurrence of the doppelgänger motif); he stands trapped in on a traffic island, his black garb blending into the surrounding darkness as unheeding humanity rushes by him in both directions (more dualities); he holds his head in his hands as, utterly alone, he kills off a bottle of Ballantine’s; he hangs his head in dejection as he stares hopelessly at the wall.  Mysterious images are interspersed into these reveries: running water (shades of Tarkovsky here, with an urban update); the bright lights of the teeming city intruding on his solitude, taunting him; a clock ticking down to an unstated but ominous deadline; glass shattering like a broken will (the deadline arives—the time for reflection is over).  In the finale the singer, now a mime, poses in front of the Void itself, trapped in an invisible box before Eternity.  Flakes of white drift through the Stygian abyss like fragments of exploded angels.  As masterfully affecting as these images are, without the searingly aware lyrics—written by a young postfeminist poetess to explore the ironic dualities of spirited youth versus weary wisdom, and of abandoned Dionysian collectivism versus painful Apollonian self-reflection—without such sure, knowing narration, the project would have come off as corny, weepy and bathetic.  Instead, it is a spiritually acute and devastating portrait of how having nowhere to go on Friday night inevitably leads to a loss of faith in life itself.   

The Dark Side of Friday is currently available to watch on YouTube.

“Be pleased then, you living one, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe’s ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot.”–Goethe, Roman Elegies, the quote that begins You, the Living

DIRECTED BY: Roy Andersson

FEATURING: A large cast of unknowns, who are given approximately equal weight in the story

PLOT: A man napping on a couch awakes, looks into the camera, and tells us that he had a nightmare that bombers were coming.  The movie then shows us fifty or so dryly absurd scenes involving many unhappy characters in a nameless Swedish city, some of whom relate their dreams to us.  Memorable sketches include a musician who tells us of his mutual fund performance while making love and a young girl spurned by a rock musician who dreams that they get married.

BACKGROUND:

• Director Roy Andersson made short films beginning in 1967.  After his first two features, En kärlekshistoria (1970) and Giliap (1975), he began directing commercials and did not return to movies until the critically acclaimed (and Certified Weird) Songs from the Second Floor (2000).  This, only his fourth feature film, was completed when he was 64 years old.
• You, the Living was refused funding by the Swedish Film Institute; Andersson reportedly accused the body of nepotism after the requested funding was instead granted to a relative of a member of the Institute.   The movie was eventually completed with funding from five different countries, and is officially listed as a Swedish-French-German-Danish-Norwegian co-production.
• The actors in the film are mostly amateurs with no previous feature film credits.  The musician is played by Eric Bäckman, a member of the Swedish gothic metal band “Deathstars.”
• All of the scenes (except one exterior) were shot on soundstages created in Andersson’s own studio.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Everyone talks about the bittersweet wedding fantasy, although the nude heavyset woman riding a skinny man while wearing his spiked military band helmet is also fairly indelible, perhaps for the wrong reasons.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Disorientingly constructed as a series of sketches with common

English language trailer for You, the Living

characters, some completely naturalistic and some totally absurd, united by uneasy, melancholy comedy, You, the Living feels like a series of dreams trapped inside a larger dream.

COMMENTS: An enigmatic movie deserves an enigmatic title, and You, the Living gives us just that.  Who are the “you” that the title addresses: the characters trapped inside the film, whose lives are depicted with such shattering mundanity that it comes around full circle to absurdity?  Or us, the audience?  And who speaks the title: who stands outside of “the living”?

Director Roy Andersson sets up an omniscient camera which quietly observes and impassively records the quietly desperate lives of residents of a Swedish city, all of whom are carefully centered within the frame.  This static observer changes viewpoints only once and only moves twice, in slow, repetitive tracking shots.  Sometimes, the characters look directly into the still camera and confess their innermost thoughts.

The setup implies a documentary objectivity, but frequently the scenes that play out before our eyes are anything but realistic.  Consider the first sequence after the prelude: a sobbing fat woman on a park bench complains that no one loves or understands her.  Her companion, and even fatter, bedraggled man dressed in black leather biker gear and covered with SS symbols and skull tattoos, listens to her complaints with a pained expression, then tries to reassure her that both he and his dog truly care for her.  The woman is having none of it; she insists no one likes her and tells her companion to scram.  Then, a dixieland jazz tune begins to play and she suddenly breaks out into a song about how she wishes she owned a motorcycle.  A meek looking man pops out from behind a tree to agree with her, but she doesn’t acknowledge him.

The movie moves on, to a shot of expressionless chefs peering out a glazed window at an unknown vista.  But these characters—the fat biker, the depressed woman, and her shy admirer—will return to continue their inconclusive story.  Joining them will be a group of marching band musicians who prefer playing jazz, whose practices causes their family and neighbors to scream and bang on the ceiling; a young girl smitten with a local rock star; a man stuck in traffic who dreamt he tried to do the tablecloth trick at a swanky party of strangers with disastrous results; a pickpocket; a racist businessman and his Arab barber; and a funeral singer, among others.  They all congregate at a gloomy neighborhood bar where it’s perpetually last call and where the gruff bartender always announces “tomorrow’s another day,” a proclamation which starts to sound more fatalistic than hopeful as the movie wears on.

Lacking an overarching narrative, the movie moves forward via a series of strange surprises which should not be spoiled.  Being utterly unable to predict what might come next will be enough to keep most people watching until the mysteriously fulfilling final shot.  The urban landscape Andersson creates is drab and drained of color, backdrops of washed-out whites inhabited by pallid people who speak slowly and deliberately.  Despite this efficient Nordic grimness, and despite moments of piercing pathos and loneliness, the film is a comedy.  There are segments that almost look like they could have been spliced in from an old Chaplin reel, such as a man who waits patiently in a ticket queue, switching from line to line only to find that someone has jumped into the open spot just before him.  But the comedy is not usually so overt.  Normally, the humor elicits a bittersweet grin of recognition rather than a belly laugh, coming from a glimpse of the absurdity of our mundane modern existences. The laughter echoes only in the space created by the gentle ironic distance Andersson puts between the viewer and his subjects.  You, the Living gets so many knowing grins from scenes of ordinary sadness that it almost founds a new genre: it’s not a black comedy, it’s a bleak comedy.

Music is one of the few light spots in this otherwise grim universe of the living dead.  The joyous dixieland jazz that echoes throughout the film serves as an ironic counterpoint to the dreary daily realities of the characters, but also as a nugget of genuine hope.  The soulful, bluesy licks that rock star Micke Larsson belts out on his guitar adds immensely to the ineffable beauty of the dream sequence, especially when he suddenly finds himself improvising to the backing of an oom-pah band.  The tune they play comes from the Swedish death spiritual the soprano sings at the funeral, as the film’s three major musical motifs all come together in one masterful moment.

In press releases, Andersson claims that You, the Living is a story “about human existence, about the business of being human, about human behavior, about human concerns, about human dreams and human sorrows, about human joy and about the unquenchable human thirst for acknowledgment and love.”  But not all of those elements appear directly in the film.  Curiously missing is human joy.   A more natural moral for the story comes in a monologue delivered by a psychiatrist speaking to the camera at the midpoint of the film: he says that his patients “demand to be happy, at the same time as they are egocentric, selfish and ungenerous.  I would like to be honest.  I would like to say that they are simply mean, most of them… These days, I just prescribe pills.  The stronger, the better.” 

Unlike the psychiatrist, Andersson has not given up; he is not prescribing a pill.  He is being honest; he is saying that most of us are mean, and deserve to be unhappy.  The quotation from Goethe that prefaces the film is a reminder to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of life, because death is coming soon to wipe them all to oblivion.  Given the joylessness of the folk in You, the Living, the title sounds like an accusation, an indictment.  But, as in Goethe, it’s also a warning.  We, the living may want to take a good, long look at ourselves, the way Andersson’s objective camera sees us.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a funny, sad, cruel film, both crystalline and puzzling, hypnotic in its intensity.”–Phillip French, The Observer (contemporaneous)

“…blackly adventurous series of takes on humanity, in sketches that range from naturalistic to surrealistic… a tragicomic walk in the park of human nature, where the trees grow at right angles and the flowers remain closed in sunlight.”–Andrew Urban, Urban Cinefile

“Humor and sorrow are equally immediate emotions throughout… There’s more than a touch of Buñuel in Andersson’s simultaneously critical and sympathetic treatment of his motley cast of characters as well as in his surrealist inclinations, a compassion for those longing for warmth, compassion, and understanding, and a sadness over their inability to recognize or assuage the grief of others.”–Nick Schager, Slant Magazine (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITE: Du Levande

IMDB LINK: Du Levande (2007)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Du Levande (You, The Living) Festival du Cannes Page – includes directors statements, stills, and a video interview with Andersson

Roy Andersson Interview – One of the few interviews with the director in English, courtesy of Little White Lies magazine

No Shadows to Hide In: A Conversation with Roy Andersson – Another rare English language interview with Andersson, conducted by Ethan Spigland

DVD INFO:  The Palisades Tartan Region 1 release (buy) features subtitled commentary from director Andersson, clips from his previous films, and an 8 minute tour of the various sets the director painstakingly constructed.  The aspect ratio is slightly off (1:1.78 versus the original 1:1.66 theatrical release) to better fit on widescreen TVs.  The quality of the NTSC video transfer has been criticized in some quarters, but Andersson’s drab and dreary aesthetic suggests that a crisper picture would not add much to the film.  The Palisades Tartan release does add bonus features not available on the more visually faithful Region 2 release (buy Region 2 disc), including a 20 minute question and answer with Andersson, a 12 minute Swedish documentary on the director and his studio, and numerous trailers.

DIRECTED BY: Andrei Tarkovsky

FEATURING: Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko, Alisa Freindlich

PLOT:  A mysterious phenomenon known as the Zone arises in a small, unnamed country.  The military sent soldiers in and the troops never returned; they cordon off the Zone with barbed wire and armed guards, but rumors persist within the populace that inside the Zone is a room that will grant the innermost wish of anyone who enters it.  A Stalker, a man capable of evading both the police and the traps formed by the Zone itself, leads a writer and a scientist into the Zone in search of the mystical room.

BACKGROUND:

• For information on director Tarkovsky, see the background section of the entry for Nostalghia.
• Stalker is very loosely based on a science fiction novel with a title translating to “Roadside Picnic” written by two brothers, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.
• After shooting the outdoor scenes for over a year on an experimental film stock, the entire footage was lost when the film laboratory improperly developed the negatives.  All the scenes had to be re-shot using a different Director of Photography.  Tarkovsky and Georgy Rerberg, the first cinematographer, had feuded on the set, and Rerberg deserted the project after the disaster with the negatives.
• Tarkovsky, his wife and assistant director Larisa, and another crew member all died of lung cancer.  Vladimir Sharun, who worked in the sound department, believed that the deaths were related to toxic waste the crew breathed in while filming downstream from a chemical plant.  He reported that the river was filled with a floating white foam that also floated through the air and gave several crew members allergic reactions.  A shot of the floating foam, which looks like snow falling in spring or summer, can be seen in the film.
• The Chernobyl nuclear disaster happened seven years after the film was released.  The quarantined area around the disaster site is sometimes referred to by locals as “The Zone,” and guides who illegally and unwisely take tourists there as “Stalkers.”
• A popular Russian video game named “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl” involves the player penetrating a “Zone” and evokes a similar visual sense as the movie.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Like most of Tarkovsky’s works, Stalker is a movie full of awe-inspiring visual poetry and splendor, making it hard to pick a single sequence.  One key scene that stands out is Stalker’s dream.  The film stock changes from color to sepia—but a very warm brown, almost golden—as the camera pans over a crystal clear stream.  A female voice whispers an apocalyptic verse and the mystical electronic flute theme plays as the camera roams over various objects lying under the water: abstract rock formations, tiles, springs, gears, a mirror clearly reflecting upside down trees, a gun, an Orthodox icon, a fishbowl with goldfish swimming in it.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Stalker is an ambiguous, but despairing, existential parable

Scene from Stalker

containing narrative non-sequiturs wrapped inside of strange and gorgeous visuals.

COMMENTS: It’s not fair to the potential viewer unfamiliar with Tarkovsky to start a review of one of his films without the following caveat: this movie isn’t for everyone.  Most people find this director’s extreme, deliberate slowness hard to digest.  There a relatively static, dialogue-free shots in Stalker that run for four minutes or more—a lot of shots like that, in fact, in a movie that runs for almost three hours.  Add to this obstacle the additional hurdle that Tarkovsky movies are obscure and difficult to comprehend: there are lots of shots that are obvious symbols (dogs, flowing water) but which appear to add up to nothing, and snatches of poetry and philosophical ramblings that seem like they must be profound but are impossible to decipher within the context of the story.  If the foregoing isn’t enough to turn you off, Tarkovsky movies are also oppressively doom-laden, full of dour Russian men with craggy faces who are slowly devoured from inside their guts by malaise.  A smile in a Tarkovsky film is almost as rare as a four syllable word in a Michael Bay production.

If you haven’t been scared off yet—if the style sounds tolerable, or even intriguing—then step into Tarkovsky’s strange world and be prepared to glimpse miracles.  If you are at the proper wavelength, Tarkovsky will cast a hypnotic spell on you like no other director.  The Russian is every bit the equal of Stanley Kubrick as a visual stylist.  Stalker contains awe-inspiring images: the sepia-lensed scenes that begin the film, set in the drab urban world, are like vintage photographs that transform poverty and squalor into beauty.  The lighting in these sequences is set to blaring, increasing contrast and bringing out light tones so that the characters glow with an unearthly light.  Tarkovsky provides unexpected textures to fill in the backgrounds: the wooden walls of the houses and barrooms are abstract and unnatural, the gray rock walls of the Zone are geometric and fractured, and at one point a rolling prairie turns liquid and wavy like a gently undulating lake.  Stalker contains many of the director’s trademark pans, slow reveals, and tracking shots, including the one in Stalker’s dream where the camera travels over a path of submerged symbols.  In some scenes, the lighting will shift slowly and almost subliminally, from grey to lava orange and back, in ways that could never happen in nature.  The constant photographic invention and trickery makes Tarkovsky a filmmaker’s filmmaker, one whom those with great visual ambition study carefully.

In Stalker, Tarkovsky adds sonic artfulness to his visual mastery.  The recurring theme from Stalker is an ahead-of-its-time mix of what we would today call “world music” and electronically altered instruments.  Tarkovsky wanted a composition that sounded like a blend of Eastern and Western music, and the melody that flows from this desire is played on a Western flute accompanied by an Armenian string instrument called the tar, with the sound of both instruments modulated by a synthesizer.  The resulting piece is strange, complex, and mystical, and creates an otherworldly atmosphere.  Although the mix of wandering Oriental melodies and synthesizers is a relatively common way to achieve a “spiritual” ambiance today, it’s worth reflecting that, in 1979, there was nothing in the world that sounded quite like this.  The musical experimentation did not end with the theme.  As the three men ride into the Zone, the clickity-clack of the train wheels on the track is slowed down and electronically altered so that each revolution of the wheel sounds like an alien drumbeat, a truly weird effect that creates a sense of foreboding an proclaims that the  journey is not to an exotic land, but rather deep inside the soul.  Add to this a quiet sound design that makes careful use of ambient echoes and splashes of water in the abandoned, quarry-like rooms of the Zone, as well as long periods of carefully orchestrated silence, and you have a sonic environment that is the auditory equivalent of the unique visual world Tarkovsky creates.  Together, the curious aural and visual worlds of Stalker combine with its unexpected narrative to create a singular, and unnerving, movie universe.

As for the story, the journey into and through the Zone provides a structure for the film, but Tarkovsky’s method constantly frustrates our expectations.  In the end the film is much more about the characters than about the events that occur to them.  Although we are told by Stalker that the Zone protects itself by constantly shifting its layout and creating traps, in the end each of the three men spends more time struggling with his companions (and even more effort wrestling with himself) than they do fighting their way through the perils of the Zone.  At the outset of the journey, there is almost the sense that this will be Tarkovsky’s action movie, as the three men sneak past armed guards and even encounter gunfire.  But the action shifts to a lower gear quickly.  We are told that the Zone is dangerous and full of traps, and Stalker insists that the men never forge ahead unless he has first thrown a nut with a bandage tied to it onto the path to assure himself there are no traps, but we never see any real evidence of mortal danger from the sentient Zone.  Instead, all the conflict comes from the men themselves.  The man known only as Writer and the man known only as Scientist squabble incessantly, with Writer usually getting the upper hand.  The two men come to distrust Stalker, and disobey his orders, without consequences.  They sweat and tremble as they consider the possibility that a diabolical snare may lie behind the next door, but when the Zone finally springs its trap on them, it is purely psychological in nature: the existential trap causes Writer to deliver the sort of despairing monologue that he had been freely offering up throughout the journey anyway, without prodding from mystical forces.  When, after some logic-defying occurrences such as the appearance of a ringing telephone (a wrong number, as it turns out), the men finally reach the antechamber of the room of wishes, the goal they have risked their lives for eludes them.  For different reasons, each man is afraid or unwilling to enter the room.  So, they sit there, on the cusp of having their ultimate dreams fulfilled, then turn back.  The film ends with an entirely unexpected, ambiguous denouement, where an unexplained miracle of uncertain significance may, or may not, occur.

Writer obviously represents right-brain intuition, and Scientist left-brain logic.  Writer is consumed by self-doubt, half-convinced that his talent is an illusion, that he is not a great genius and that his words will not live on past him.  Scientist is more inscrutable, but it turns out in the end that his character has an important twist to provide the story.  It’s Stalker himself who most engages our interest.  Although he serves as the other men’s guide, as the journey progresses it is revealed that he is just as flawed, afraid and tormented as the others.  There are intriguing suggestions that he is a Christ-like figure, one that the other two men defy and refuse to put their faith in, and that he suffers psychically from his failure to lead his charges to happiness—or to whatever exactly it is that the room will bring them.

Stalker is a movie which is built out of loose ends.  Each of the three men sets out to complete a quest, but chicken out when the time comes for action, and end the story exactly where they began.  Conspicuously highlighted symbols cascade through the movie, but never reveal their significance: water, trains, the dog that follows Stalker throughout the Zone, not to mention the long, random parade of submerged images Stalker envisions while he dreams of Biblical apocalypse.  No rational explanation is ever offered for the origin of the Zone itself, and the existence of the possibly mythical room of wishes.  The men philosophize and poetize about the meaning of life throughout the film, but never come to any firm conclusions.  Their various speculations, considered together, demonstrate no consistency or intellectual rigor or add up to a thesis.  Some might consider this overweening pretentiousness—filling the frame with half-explored ideas in order to suggest a profound meaning that the director is incapable of delivering.  Others may find it humble, an accurate and honest realization by the artist that he is smart enough to recognize the big questions of life and the human soul, but not omnipotent so as to answer them.  Stalker remains a fascinating, and frustrating, mystery, if we are capable of seeing it; but it bores us if we are firmly lodged in an age where our homes no longer have house-spirits, or our churches Gods.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s certainly not necessary to construct an Oz or an E.T. in the service of every film fantasy. On the other hand, the fact that film is a visual medium cannot entirely be ignored.  ‘Stalker’ offers the eye so little that it might well have made a better novel, or short story, than a nearly three-hour-long film.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Weird, imagist allegory of the perils of intellectualism in Russia.”–The Guardian (DVD)

“… something akin to the essence of what man is made of: a tangled knot of memories, fears, fantasies, nightmares, paradoxical impulses, and a yearning for something that’s simultaneously beyond our reach and yet intrinsic to every one of us.”–Nick Schager, Slant Magazine (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Stalker (1979)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Stalker at nostalghia.com: The Stalker page at the ultimate Tarkovsky site (more of an academic resource than a fan site) features several interviews with the crew of Stalker and with Tarkovsky himself

Is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker about the gulags? Chernobyl? EU immigration?: Reflections on the possible meanings of the film by novelist Geoff Dyer

DVD INFO: The 2-disc release by Kino (buy) contains the movie, not remastered and presented in full screen. There is an option to hear the dialogue overdubbed by a single actor in either English or French; this is an odd choice, and one that I can’t imagine many people would be interested in taking advantage of. Disc 2 contains interviews with the composer, cameraman, and production designer about their roles in the film’s production and memories of Tarkovsky. It also contains excerpts from Tarkovsky’s film school graduation project and some footage of Tarkovsky’s ruined childhood home.

The Kino release, although almost identical in content, supersedes the the Ruscico DVD, which was poorly received by many Tarkovsky fans because of the decision to replace Tarkovsky’s mono soundtrack with newly created Dolby 5.1 surround sound audio. In creating the new soundtrack, some of the music was altered and some ambient sound effects were added where the director had chosen to place only silence.  The Kino release offers the option of listening to either soundtrack.

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.)]