Tarkovsky's first film abroad climaxes with a man carrying a candle
In Nostalghia a homesick Russian writer promises a strange Italian recluse he will cross an empty spa pool holding a lit candle without letting it go out. He tries again and again. For Andrei Tarkovsky, making his 1983 film far from Moscow, the story drew on his own feelings as a Russian stranded in Italy.
Nostalghia was Tarkovsky's first film made outside the Soviet Union. He wrote it with Tonino Guerra, and it follows Andrei Gorchakov, a writer researching an 18th-century Russian composer who had lived in Italy. Gorchakov travels with his interpreter, Eugenia, but feels displaced and aches to go home. In a village he befriends Domenico, a former asylum patient famous for trying to cross a mineral pool with a lit candle, convinced that doing so will save the world.
Making the film was a struggle. It began pre-production around 1980 under the working title Viaggio in Italia, which was dropped because Roberto Rossellini had already used it in 1954. When Mosfilm withdrew its backing, Tarkovsky finished with money from Italian state television and the French company Gaumont, cutting Russian scenes and recreating Russian settings in Italy. His original lead, Anatoly Solonitsyn, died of cancer in 1982, and Oleg Yankovsky, from Mirror, stepped in.
Tarkovsky described Russian nostalgia abroad as a disease that drains the soul's strength, but also as a deep empathy with the suffering of others. Scouting with Guerra, he admired Renaissance buildings and art, yet what moved him most was the Italian sky and how it changed with the hour and the weather. He said this film showed him that cinema could make its author's inner life visible. Its locations include the spa at Bagno Vignoni and the roofless Abbey of San Galgano, where the last shot sets a Russian house inside the ruin.
At Cannes in 1983 it won Best Director, shared with Robert Bresson, along with the ecumenical jury and critics' prizes. Soviet officials blocked it from the Palme d'Or, which strengthened Tarkovsky's resolve never to work in the Soviet Union again. Vincent Canby complained that nothing happens. The film still received nine votes in Sight and Sound's 2012 greatest-films poll, though it remains one of Tarkovsky's less-known works.
Source: Nostalghia
