Nostalghia (1983)

Saw Nostalghia, a fairly crazy film from Andrei Tarkovsky.  It follows a Russian male poet and an Itallian woman travelling to Bologna Italy to research a Russian composer who lived there for a while.  Early on in the film, the poet scolds the woman for reading a book of translated poetry.  Poetry is untranslatable, like all art, he claims.  The Italian woman counters: if Russian poetry cannot be translated into Italian, how can they ever hope to understand each other?  This is the question at the heart of the film: how can we ever understand each other?

The poet's attitude is that people are too fundamentally different to understand each other perfectly.  We are so caught up in our own understanding of the world, that we cannot fully understand anyone else's.  Contrasted with this, there's the philosophy of a mad-man that he runs into which can be summed up with 1+1=1.  We are all the same, claims the mad-man, understanding is consensus.

The film is much more on the poet's side of this debate.  The nature of his relationship with the Italian woman is understood differently by both of them, to disastrous results.  Also, the mad-man once imprisoned his family in their house for 7 years.  If we are all one, why is he locking himself away like this?

The poet's name is Andrei and I believe he's supposed to be a Tarkovsky self-insert, hence why the film takes his side.  It also makes a lot of sense that someone involved in creating art for others to consume would quickly run up against the subjective nature of art.  The film is also filled with Tarkovsky-isms: endless slow of water in still pools, or raining down, flowing down window panes, German shepherd dogs, religious iconography, moss-eaten stones.  It feels like he's reinforcing his point with this self-indulgence: these symbols mean so much to him.  Do you see them how he does?  Do they do anything for you?

The film concludes by examining how the poet and the mad-man try to communicate with the world: one in an explosive spectacle which moves no one, and the other quietly and intimately in a way which also seems to reach no one, but which seems profoundly meaningful to the communicator if to no one else.

It's an interesting film, however a little slow.  It's not the most entertaining film to watch, but it's interesting to think about and sort of decode.  Even when the imagery is inscrutable, it's striking.