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Nostalgia
on DVD (1983)
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Brief synopsis of Nostalgia
Director Andrei Tarkovsky recasts his lifelong cinematic motif of humanity's quest for faith in the waterlogged and mist-ensconced countryside of Italy for his philosophical masterpiece NOSTALGIA. Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky) is a misanthropic Russian scholar researching the life of an exiled Russian composer who committed suicide. With the help of his beautiful guide, Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano), Andrei visits mystical and religious sites on the trail of the late composer's legacy. In the shadow of the doomed composer's memory, Andrei finds himself crippled by a melancholy nostalgia for his Russian homeland, only to discover redemption in the form of a madman, Domenico (Erland Josephson), whom he encounters at St. Catherine's pool, a religious site in Sienna. Domenico, a former professor who once locked his family away for seven years in anticipation of Armageddon, now leads a seemingly insane existence, believing that if he can travel across the pool with a lighted candle, he can save all of humanity. As in his mystical film THE MIRROR, Tarkovsky weaves a dense, mediatative pattern of images--freely mixing past and present, dream and reality, color and black and white, landscape and architecture--with the scholar and the madman acting as allegorical players in a metaphysical trial by fire and water.
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Critics Reviews
Radio Times
Andrei Tarkovsky's first non-Soviet picture is clearly the work of an exile who can never regain his lost past. Yet, in rejecting a possible affair and his intellectual researches to undertake the eternal quest for enlightenment, Oleg Yankovsky finds redemption of sorts as he rises to the symbolic challenge of carrying a lighted candle across a sulphurous spa — a challenge posed by Erland Josephson, the apocalypse-obsessed resident of a Tuscan shrine town. Contrasting monochrome flashbacks with desaturated colour landscapes, Tarkovsky poetically employs langorous takes which not only convey Yankovsky's fragile mental and spiritual condition, but also heighten the mesmerising mysticism of this metaphysical allegory.
Los Angeles Times
"...In its stately, measured way NOSTALGHIA, in its culminating spirit of affirmation, becomes akin to a religious experience..."
Time Out
Another of Tarkovsky's strange, hauntingly beautiful meditations on man's search for self. The film may forsake the...
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