Few filmmakers have dared to sculpt time with the same stubborn gravity as Andrei Tarkovsky. If cinema is for him a block of temporal marble from which to extract a spiritual truth, Nostalghia is the work in which the chisel trembles, in which the material becomes more porous, almost liquid, imbued with a perennial rain that is not only atmospheric but existential. The film is a symphony in gray and sepia of a soul in exile, a visual poem whose melody is not the sweet melancholy of memory, but the incurable disease of distance, the Russian toska that has no precise translation but which every frame of this film manages to inoculate under the skin.

The protagonist, Andrej Gorčakov, is a Russian poet traveling in Italy to search for traces of an 18th-century musician, Pavel Sosnovskij, also an exile who ultimately chose to return to his homeland only to be reduced to servitude and suicide. But this biographical research is a mere pretext, a MacGuffin of the soul. Gorchakov is not a character, he is a sensor, a seismograph that records the tremors of a divided inner world. He is the intellectual who has lost the language of faith, the modern man whose culture can no longer bridge the gap to the transcendent. His is not a tourist crisis, but a veritable metaphysical ordeal that unfolds among the ancient stones of Bagno Vignoni and the ruins of an abbey. Oleg Jankovskij, with his mask of cosmic weariness, perfectly embodies this state of suspension, this being here with the body and elsewhere with the spirit, in a performance that is almost entirely internal, made up of gazes lost in the void and silences more eloquent than any dialogue.

In this limbo, Gorchakov encounters two mirror images representing the poles of his split personality. On the one hand, his translator Eugenia, played by a vibrant Domiziana Giordano, is the embodiment of a sensual, pragmatic but spiritually deaf West. Her beauty is earthly, her frustration palpable; she seeks human, carnal contact, which Gorchakov, now a prisoner of his inner fortress, cannot grant. Their inability to communicate is abysmal, a dialogue between deaf people that anticipates the drift of so many Antonionian couples lost in desolate landscapes of the soul. On the other hand, there is Domenico, the village “madman,” a former professor who kept his family locked up for seven years waiting for the end of the world. In any other film, he would be a caricature. For Tarkovsky, he is a mad saint, an unheeded prophet, a direct descendant of Dostoevsky's great mystical idiots. Erland Josephson gives him a tragic and feverish dignity, transforming him into a sort of Stalker who does not lead towards a physical “Zone,” but towards an act of pure and seemingly senseless faith: crossing the dried-up thermal pool of Santa Caterina with a lit candle.

It is here that the film transcends narrative and becomes ritual. The mission of the candle, which Gorchakov accepts almost reluctantly from Domenico, becomes the beating heart of the film. It is a gesture that defies logic, utilitarianism, modernity itself. It is a miniature pilgrimage, an act of obedience to an unwritten law, the desperate affirmation that a gratuitous and symbolic gesture can still save the world, or at least a soul. The first two times, the flame goes out. The third attempt, filmed in a sequence shot of almost unbearable length and tension, is one of the greatest moments in the history of cinema. We see Jankovsky's fragility, his physical fatigue mirroring his spiritual fatigue, his body protecting that tiny, flickering flame as if it were humanity's last glimmer of hope. It is cinema that is not watched, but experienced. It is a prayer.

Visually, Nostalghia is perhaps the point of no return for Tarkovsky's aesthetic. Working outside the Soviet Union for the first time, with an Italian crew and the great Tonino Guerra as co-screenwriter, Tarkovsky does not film the Italy of “la dolce vita.” He films an ancient, eroded, almost post-atomic landscape, where classical beauty lies in ruins and nature reclaims what is hers. The sequences in Italy are shot in sepia-toned black and white, desaturated, like an old faded photograph, while the memories/dreams of Russia are immersed in a lush but equally melancholic green. Water, Tarkovsky's element par excellence, is everywhere: it rains inside churches, drips from walls, fills the rooms of dreams. It is the element of memory, dissolution, baptism, and drowning. Each shot is composed with the rigor of a Renaissance painting (Piero della Francesca is explicitly cited as a tutelary deity) and at the same time with the desolation of a romantic landscape à la Caspar David Friedrich, with man small and powerless in the face of the sublime and the mysterious.

The most profound, and perhaps most painful, analysis of Nostalghia is, however, the metatextual one. The film is its author's most candid self-portrait. Gorchakov is Tarkovsky. His nostalgia for the Russian dacha, for his wife, for a landscape that is also a state of mind, is the nostalgia of Tarkovsky himself, who during filming was maturing the decision never to return to the USSR, becoming not only a spiritual but also a political exile. This awareness charges the film with a heart-wrenching urgency. It is not an intellectual exercise on exile; it is the cry of a man whose homeland has become a dreamlike image, an unattainable ghost. His illness is the impossibility of uniting the two worlds, the inability to live fully either here or there, condemned to be a stranger everywhere.

This conflict finds its impossible and miraculous synthesis in the final shot, one of those technical and conceptual wonders that only cinema can create. In a single, majestic long shot, we see the Russian dacha, with the family and the dog, built inside the ruined nave of an immense Italian Gothic cathedral. It is an image that defies physics and logic, a photomontage of the soul. It is the visual representation of Gorchakov's (and Tarkovsky's) condition: carrying one's home, one's Russia, within oneself, like a sanctuary and a prison, wherever one goes. It is not an image of reconciliation, but of perpetual, magnificent division. It is as if the Room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey were not an evolutionary landing place, but a cage furnished with the furniture of one's memories.

Nostalghia is not an easy film. It requires patience and abandonment. It repels viewers who are looking for a plot, a storyline, a resolution. But for those willing to immerse themselves in its slow and murky waters, those willing to walk alongside Gorchakov in his earthly purgatory, the film offers an experience of almost unbearable depth. It is a treatise on faith in an age of doubt, an essay on identity in an uprooted world, and above all, it is the most intimate confession of an artist who paid the highest price for his freedom and his art. You don't come out of Nostalghia with answers. You come out with the feeling of having touched the raw nerve of a soul, and of having discovered that, in some way, that nerve is also ours.