So — continuing my Festival Of 80s Art House Movies.
I’m not sure whether I’ve seen this one before. If I did, it was probably on like a bootlegged VHS when I was 15?
All these hallways and doorways…
This is what I want my bedroom to look like!
This 4K bluray has been beautifully restored. This movie has probably never looked as good as this before. And soon, I’m guessing they’re going to stop restoring movies this painstaking way, and instead ask an LLM to do it: “Hallucinate this movie as if it were 4K” and then all movies will feature Nick Cage.
That’s the best-trained dog actor ever.
It’s so weird seeing Erland Josefsson in this — not because of the Italian that’s on the soundtrack, but because I’m constantly hearing his lines in his own voice instead of the one they’ve dubbed him into. I can tell by his mouth movements that he’s actually delivering the lines in Italian, but of course, at this time they didn’t actually record any sound on sets in Italy, so it’s all dubbed, but they’ve got a voice actor that sounds nothing like him.
It’s so weird — I’ve seen him in so many movies that his voice and very distinctive delivery is just a natural phenomenon to me, and it’s missing here.
Tarkovsky’s tableaux usually look so striking, so it’s jarring when you get something kike this, where it looks kinda like a parody of a Tarkovsky scene…
I wonder what the story behind this one is. There’s so many shots reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s previous movies — it’s like the producers told him “we really liked Stalker! Make a movie with all those scenes! But make a new story!” And so we ended up with a kind of … post-landing-on-Solaris thing, but very wet.
Ok ok, it’s probably not that at all — what with the main character being a Russian author called “Andrei”.
Almost every shot here is stunning… and the storyline kinda peters out. But it’s still a great movie.
Vincent Canby of The New York Times said that Tarkovsky “may well be a film poet but he’s a film poet with a tiny vocabulary. […] Nothing happens.” Dave Kehr was mildly positive, considering it to be “packed with imagery that seems at once hopelessly obscure and crushingly obvious” while also arguing that the work “does succeed in inducing some kind of trance.
Anyway:
Nostalghia. Andrei Tarkovsky. 1983. ⚅
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