Nostalgia

If both the nostalgic and the romantic are aestheticisations, then what is it that causes one to endure, and the other, to flit, fleetingly, away? There is a certain pathos contained in the former that attaches itself to one, which, in the latter, instead, fades away. Nostalghia will stay with you, for the rest of time.

“Nostalghia” could be considered as Tarkovsky's “8 1/2”, just much more cryptic and with a far bleaker outcome. The director uses the main character to show us his own thoughts, memories, and obsessions in a stream of consciousness kind of way. The film is painfully slow and self-indulgently rehashes motifs already glimpsed in Tarkovsky’s previous works, yet it is packed with memorable images and breathtakingly beautiful locations. Interesting how spaces are used to express the character’s alienation and loneliness - we will rarely see two people in the same shot, and even in those rare times, they will always keep an unnatural distance. While I enjoyed the visuals, the script felt like the weak link in the chain, with bloated monologues and pseudo-intellectual conversations, even though t’s also true that the wooden Italian dub didn’t really help in that sense.