nostalgia (w&d tarkovsky, w tonino guerra)

Cinemateca still has a limited foro, something like 50%, at a guess. So it’s not a surprise that this screening of Tarkovsky’s penultimate film was effectively sold out. What was a surprise, was the demographic of the audience. Impossible to say if I was the oldest person there, but what was evident was that the majority were younger than me. One normally associates venerable art movies with a more elderly public, but that wasn’t the case last night. Which was refreshing. Even more so, given the reaction at the film’s conclusion. The final shot is a lengthy, artistic, as close to the transcendent as cinema perhaps gets. The film concluded and there was a tangible silence, an immobility. No-one rushed to get up. As though we were all gradually returning to the other world, after our deep immersion in Tarkovsky world. 

Nostalgia is a film which at times feels almost playful, bordering on the melodramatic. The relationship between Gorchakov and Eugenia is charged with soap opera tension. There’s a glorious scene where Eugenia psychs herself to run up some stairs but instead goes flying on her high heels. She gets up laughing. She’s a belligerently anti-Tarkovskian character who undercuts the film’s solemnity, refusing to kneel in the opening sequence when they visit a church. Perhaps because of this lightness, the moments of alt-poetry feel all the more bewildering and astonishing. The film plays with Gorchakov’s memories, which infiltrate the narrative like a ghost dog, the same dog that crops up in both the Italian world of the action and the Russian world of memory. This more playful Tarkovsky refuses to let the viewer settle into anything close to reverence. The sound of drilling, of Chinese music, invades and distracts. The viewer isn’t sure where to place themselves, anymore than the Russian visitors seem to know how to place themselves within the complex faded glory of Italy. 

This disorientation, perhaps most cruelly expounded in a scene where a clown mocks Domenico, the holy fool who has set himself on fire, eventually builds towards the harrowing, over processed finale, whose very intensity acts as a release. Finally we understand where we are. Finally we realise that this has been as close to an act of prayer as we’re likely to get in this sacrilegious world. The seriousness comes as a relief. This is what we need. We need the snow to fall on the ruined abbey of our modern world.