Tomorrow is the End of the World

Today sees the release by Kino Lorber of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. This is the first time the film has been available in any kind of high quality home video presentation, and it’s my understanding, though the evidence is purely anecdotal, that until now a general unavailability has caused the reputation of Nostalghia among Tarkovsky’s work to dip somewhat. Having just watched the film for the first time, via the Kino Blu-ray, I am now in a position to sneer at those who would regard it as a weaker effort. “You guys are dumb,” is something I might say. But where would that get any of us? What I'll say instead is that Nostalghia feels to me like a genuine masterpiece, one whose reputation can only strengthen when seen by new eyes.

In the film Oleg Yankovsky plays Andrei, a poet who travels to Italy to study the life of and exiled Russian composer. Accompanying him is Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano), an interpreter with whom he also he has a fraught and unconsummated relationship. The possibility of sex hangs over them both, but Andrei has a family back in Russia, and in general his mind seems preoccupied with other matters. In the course of their trip together, they end up at what you'd call a spa, I suppose, where clients wade in the natural hot springs, but the place is ancient, crumbling, melancholy -- almost sinister, though sinister less in an aggressive sense and more in a sense of hopeless melancholy. There Andrei hears about, and then meets and becomes fascinated by an apocalyptic madman named Domenico (Bergman veteran Erland Josephson), who at one time was so sure the world was about to end that he locked his family up in their home for seven years. Once released, the didn't stick around much longer.

While writing the script (with Tonino Guerra) in Italy and before filming, Tarkovsky had considered defecting from the Soviet Union. However, like the Andrei in the film, he had a family back home and couldn't bring himself to do it. Nostalghia doesn't so much dramatize this split in his desires as it turns them into apocalyptic poetry. And if "apocalyptic" can be described as a form, or a mode, then it is most effective when it's used to not deal literally with the end of the world. This is Nostalghia. Just look at Tarkovsky's depiction of Italy -- nowhere in this film will you see the kind of bright, sunny beauty that you typically find in other films set in Italy, even films that aren't particularly interested in celebrating that beauty. Most times it sort of just happens. But Tarkovsky and cinematographer Giuseppe Lanci film their little patch of Italy as if it was part of the Russian wasteland where Trakovsky shot Stalker. In other words, never has Italy looked more like Russia. Occasionally the film looks like it was (or actually was?) filmed in black and white, but as these scene progress, bits of color seep in, or light up (the opening shot of Andrei and Eugenia's car driving along a foggy road reveals color through the gray in a brilliant way). Green is the one color that finds its way past the dead white of crumbling walls that actually appears inviting -- perhaps that's Italy. Perhaps that's where Tarkovsky longs to be, and the Italy of the hot springs, all dank and sunken and haunted, is where he actually exists because Russia is both never far from his mind, or from his future. The Andrei played by Yankovsky has a tough time getting home, too.

Domenico, however, holds the real power of the film -- he holds the apocalypse, and he holds what little hope is left to anybody. The section of the film that depicts Domenico's fate -- and as intriguing as we, and Andrei (both of them), may find his ramblings it should never be forgotten that he's insane -- is one of the most viscerally terrifying that I've ever seen. It's a scene of complete madness, almost Lynchian in its use of sound, but less otherworldly and more blunt -- what's weird about it is still earthly. It's the end of the world in miniature, and it gave me that weightless, uneasy feeling that you, or anyway I, sometimes get when a film really begins to howl, when the darkness is clarified as not being an artistic pose, or simply appropriate for whatever story is being told, but inherent and unavoidable within the man who made it. Yet even then, you can interpret what follows as..."hopeful" sounds too, well, hopeful, and "optimistic" is precisely wrong. In Nostalghia's final minutes, Tarkovsky can't even be said to urge anyone to not give up. What matters, and I won't be specific about what happens, is that even though it won't work, at least the guy did it.

Yet More Capsule Reviews

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Enjoy them, will you?

The Final Destination (d. David R. Ellis) - Supposedly, this is the last installment of this unfortunately successful, and unfortunately occasionally entertaining series of horror films. But what sets it apart as the last one? It's the exact same film as the previous three! A group of people, mostly young and boring, survive a ridiculous disaster with the help of the psychic abilities bestowed upon one of their number. Death, not having any of that, then begins to elaborately pick them off one by one. THE END. Again, it's no different from the other films, except that it's quite a bit worse. There is one set-up in the beginning, and call-back at the end, that might have been spooky if the rest of the movie weren't so bone stupid. Also, the special effects are terrible.

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First Name: Carmen (d. Jean-Luc Godard) - Apart from the pleasant surprise of Tom Waits's "Ruby's Arms" being used extensively and effectively in the film's last third, this wearyingly opaque story about a man and a woman who may be bank-robbers, or instead may be making a movie, and who are probably, this being Godard, Marxists, but who are in any case falling out of love, is a typically, this being Godard, frustrating wank. Maruschka Detmers is lovely, and frequently nude, though, and this is not something I take lightly.

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A Film With Me In It (d. Ian Fitzgibbon) - Written by lead actor Mark Doherty (I say "lead actor" as opposed to "star" because Dylan Moran gives the more memorable performance), this film is about a struggling, and failing, actor who suddenly finds himself living in an apartment where people have fatal accidents, sometimes separated by mere minutes. What does one do in such a situation? The cops won't believe a word of the truth, so you begin to act as though you were actually guilty of murder. The film is not un-funny, but its intentionally absurd premise is stretched way too far (eventually, people die of things that wouldn't actually kill them), and the allegedly hilarious, cynical pay-off is incredibly ill-advised: boring, old-hat, ruinous.

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Stalker (d. Andrei Tarkovsky) - A full review of this Russian masterpiece would defeat me, so this capsule format is a life-saver. At heart -- or maybe only at the edges -- Stalker is a sober, philosophical, science-fiction riff on The Wizard of Oz: in the future, after an unspecified global calamity (given that this was made in Russia in the late 70s, I think we can assume it was nuclear in nature), a mysterious new region has opened up called the Zone, and somewhere in there is a place that grants wishes. The especially desperate hire people known as "stalkers" who can take them to this place, avoiding the dangers, and traps, the Zone creates along the way. The film tells of one stalker (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky), known as "The Stalker", who leads two men -- The Writer and The Professor -- into the Zone, and towards wish-fulfillment. Or so they claim to want.

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The Wizard of Oz-ness of Stalker comes not only from the wish-fulfillment quest in a fantasy-land (which is achieved entirely without any -- okay, maybe one -- special effects, and almost entirely through the psychology of, it would seem, you, the viewer) but from the "real world" scenes being shot not in black-and-white so much as in sepia-and-white. And Tarkovsky's eye for those images is utterly astonishing. Calling a film hypnotic is such a bland thing to say, but I don't know quite how else to describe my state of mind when watching one of those sepia images, this one silent, of the Stalker lying in a shallow creek bed, as a black dog runs through the water towards him. Stalker lives almost entirely on its images -- and some execellent acting -- but what Tarkovsky accomplishes simply by photographing the Soviet Union and calling it science fiction is pretty extraordinary.