The length of the shots and the glacial slowness of the film verge on affectation. It is a lugubrious film. But somehow Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (this is how he asks us to spell it) is a film about hope.
At the outset, Gorchakov and Eugenia drive through the dawn mist towards the ancient Chapel of St Catherine. Gorchakov is a Russia writer, in Italy to research the life of a Russian composer. Eugenia is a translator, beautiful and independent.
Her high heels prevent her from kneeling to pray in the Chapel of St Catherine to which she has driven Gorchakov. But the Russian does not enter the church. Eugenia berates him: it was his idea to drive halfway across Italy to see the painting of the Madonna by Piero della Francesca …
Perhaps we are supposed to see Eugenia as modern woman, too proud, too independent. We see her wandering the dark church in her opulent clothes. The Sacristan asks her: ‘have you come to pray for a child, or to be relieved from one?’ Eugenia tells his she is looking, just looking … Tarkovsky is sexist, we think to ourselves. But perhaps something else is happening here.
Eugenia says on first seeing the cathedral: ‘It is an amazing sight, when I saw it first, you know, I simply cried. Just look at the light!’ The film asks us to compare her to the woman at cathedral entrance, chanting ‘Virgin … Mother … Sister … Bride … Sea … Sky … Sun … Moon … Star’. It is incantation. They kneel to pray at the cathedral steps and, kneeling, mount the steps.
What do we see? It is as though the Chapel belongs to an older world, one we cannot re-enter. But it is this world to which the madman Domenico belongs.
We meet him first trying to cross the hot pool dedicated to Saint Catherine of Siena in the Tuscan village Bagno Vignoni, where the protagonists are staying. Then we hear he locked himself in the house for seven years with his family, waiting for the end of the world.
He’s mad, Eugenia tells Gorchakov, who replies:
We don’t know what so-called insanity, or madness, is. First, they are inconvenient, they get in everyone’s way … Their behaviour, their wishes lie outside the generally accepted rules… And then, we simply don’t wish to understand them. They are terribly lonely, but I’m sure they are closer to the truth than we are …
Domenico is an Idiot, a Holy Fool. Gorchakov is fascinated by Domenico, this former teacher of mathematics; he demands to be taken to him. He talks to the Fool. Eugenia leaves. Domeinco tells him he intends to save the world. And he tells Gorchakov to cross the hot pool at the Tuscan village Bagno Vignoni holding a lit candle in his hands.
Domenico immolates himself on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Capitoleum, an ancient Roman square, after preaching to onlookers for three days. Aflame, crawling along the ground, he cries, ‘What is this world worth, what is the value of its truth if some unhappy mental patient, as you call us, tells you: “You should be ashamed of yourselves!” While there’s still time!’
And Eugenia? She travels to India with her new companion ‘He’s interested in spiritual matters’ she tells Gorchakov on the phone. Gorchakov carries the candle across the pool as Domenico asks. Twice he fails, but the third time, he succeeds. At the end he stumbles. Commentators tell us he dies, but I’m not sure.
It is a lugubrious film. The key, one might assume, is Tarkovsky’s own nostalgia for Russia. But Russia here means not only Gorchakov’s wife and daughter, but also the unity of a culture in terms of which everything will make sense.
Gorchakov: ‘Poetry can’t be translated… Art in general is untranslatable …’
Eugenina: ‘… but how would we ever have known Tolstoy, Pushkin? How could we even begin to understand Russia, if …’
Gorchakov: ‘But you don’t understand Russia at all’.
Eugenina: ‘And Dante, Petrarch, Macchiavelli? So Russians don’t know Italy!’
Gorchakov: ‘Of course not, how could we?’
Then Gorchakov gestures vaguely towards abolish national borders in order to overcome this difference.
I should add that Gorchakov is sexually drawn to Eugenia. She knows it. She berates him. Perhaps nostalgia also designates a desire for the security of family life.
Nostalgia, then, for what is lost – for Mother Russia, the unity of culture, the security of a wife and child. Nostalgia for the places of men and women, and for human beings who can kneel.
Why is Gorchakov fascinated by Domenico? The latter is indomitable, possessed of his beliefs, uncompromising. He will protest against what the world has become. It is his madness which allows Domenico to dream of transforming his society through his act of self-sacrifice. How futile! Yet he fascinates Gorchakov. Here, too, there is nostalgia, which one can understand from Tarkovsky’s remarks in an interview:
I am convinced that “time” in itself is no objective category, as “time” cannot exist apart from man’s perception of it. Certain scientific discoveries tend to draw the same conclusion. We do not live in the “now.” The “now” is so transient, as close to zero as you can get without it being zero, that we simply have no way of grasping it. The moment in time we call “now” immediately becomes the “past,” and what we call the “future” becomes the “now” and then it immediately becomes “past.” The only way to experience the now is if we let ourselves fall into the abyss which exists between the now and the future. And this is the reason “nostalghia” is not the same as mere sorrow over past time. Nostalghia is a feeling of intense sadness over the period that went missing at a time when we forsook counting on our internal gifts, to properly arrange and utilize them,… and thus neglected to do our duty.
Tarkovsky invokes nostalgia for the future, retrieving its sense, its promise from the deathly repetition of the past. Nostalghia would incite hope in us, a hope against hope, a hope to shore against what hope has become. But this is possible only when we put ourselves in the place of Gorchakov in his fascination with Domenico. Is this possible?
Tarkovsky has hopes for the artwork itself:
An artistic discovery occurs each time as a new and unique image of the world, a hieroglyphic of absolute truth. It appears as a revelation, as a momentary, passionate wish to grasp intuitively and at a stroke all the laws of this world – its beauty and ugliness, its compassion and cruelty, its infinity and its limitations. (Sculpting in Time, 27)
Truth? One might think Tarkovsky is nostalgic for the old place of art in a cosmos where human beings could look up to the stars and discover a source of the divine law mirrored in their souls. Musn’t one acknowledge that those stars have fallen, and there is no place for human beings in the cosmos? This is what Nostalghia reveals to me: the old laws have gone. It is no more possible to disappear into the world of the women at the church, of Domenico, than it is to become an animal, dwelling in nature as water does in water. The world, the whole world, can strike us as meaningless, as without sense or direction. But perhaps there is hope here – hope in the face of those who still believe in the great political projects through which freedom will arrive as a result of collective work, of shared labour. A hope implicit in what in a kind of resistance in things themselves, and in the relations between us, any of us, all of us. This is what Gorchakov’s wandering, his inability to complete his tasks or to resolve on any course of action, his sublime weakness suggests to me.
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