Tarkovsky's least successful film

Another poster has suggested that even Tarkovsky fans don't rate this one, and, as a huge Tarkovsky fan, I would like to say there's a good reason why not. His exile from Russia separated him from his natural material, and in trying to recapture that in Tuscany and Rome, even in making a film about exile and longing for a homeland (both real and spiritual), he constantly comes up empty.

The beautiful, lush imagery is still present - there are moments even here, in his worst picture, which will leave you gasping - but it's in the service of so very little. A Russian scholar searches in an increasingly desultory fashion for information on an obscure Russian composer who once passed through this part of Italy while suffering increasing intimations of his mortality; an Italian translator becomes increasingly frustrated at his dis-association from lived experience; and the local madman (played by a poorly dubbed Swede) tries to persuade everyone that the world is coming to an end. It's the director's bleakest vision (the crucifix - always Tarkovsky's central image - is glimpsed only through a haze on a distant dome above the Roman city-scape that suddenly, surprisingly intrudes at exactly the three-quarter point), culminating in one death and one self-immolation (played out as tourist attraction). In all of Tarkovsky's other films, there is redemption of some kind (even in 'Ivan's childhood', you know that the Russians eventually won the war); here, there is nothing except the memory of joy once attained, in the past, in another country.