Nostalgia

Another of Tarkovsky's strange, hauntingly beautiful meditations on man's search for self. The film may forsake the run-down space station of Solaris or the miraculous Zone of Stalker for the hilltop villages of Tuscany, but its framework is familiar (flashbacks in spectral black-and-white, the use of rich sepia alongside pastel colour to blur distinctions between dream and reality), and so are its themes (memory, melancholia, disenchantment with the material world, dogged stumbling after salvation). An appropriately haggard academic, Gorchakov (Jankovsky), has come to Italy to research the life of an obscure Russian composer. Brooding over familial traumas and his compatriot's eventual suicide, he's incapable of communicating with his statuesque young interpreter (Giordano), let alone having an affair with her. In the meantime he meets Domenico (Josephson), a recluse whom the locals dismiss as mad. Each man recognises something of himself in the other, and they embark upon the most absolute of alliances...Tarkovsky remains as much a metaphysician as anything else, and Nostalgia isn't an entertainment but an article of faith. AMac.