Nostalghia

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful and Intensely Boring
Review: With all the fabulous reviews, it seems heresy to say this, but this film by Tarkovsky is about as interesting as watching grass grow. Watching someone ruminating in a bedroom for a very, very long time reminds me of Andy Warhol's film of a couple sleeping for hours. And filming someone walking across an empty swimming pool with a candle for an ETERNITY does not qualify as great cinema. There is undoubtedly some DEEP MESSAGE here, but the adulation of all this seems similar to admiring the King's new clothes. This review may type cast me as some Hollywood oriented air head with a 30 second attention span. No indeed. I love minimalist, languid, intelligent, spiritual movies by Besson, Bergman, Dreyer et al. Very much enjoyed Tarkovsky's "Andrei Rublev". Yet "Nostalghia" tests the outer limits of the audience's patience. It might better have been entitled "Torpor". Great photography and some nice dream like sequences, but not a film that you would want to watch more than once (if that).

Rating:
Summary: "The most important movie?"
Review: With his sixth movie, Tarkovsky finally did it. He indeed had filmed dreams in "The Mirror", and personally I find "Nostalghia" the summum of his concerns. I have not seen it again, perhaps for some matters of religion that had fallen out of interest for me for a long time (spirituality or lack of it is the recurrent theme in Tarkovsky's beautiful work). What I mean is that, never before with any other film, not even with Kubrick's final sequence in "2001..." I felt that a movie could portray with such subtlety a dilemma of faith. Not through the dialogs, or through the almost non existent plot, but, at some point, I can assure that I had what some people would call a glimpse of faith. I find it hard to communicate these thoughts because I may sound pretentious or hilarious. Anyway, because of what I was going through at that point of my life, the dream sequences seemed more real than anything I had ever seen, in dreams and in cinema: I was truly inspired and deffinitely I would have given the film then a rating of "non plus ultra" for what I consider true artistic and religious commitment. (And the reason that I give it now a full five stars rating is because of a strange lasting impression that other "masterpieces" lack for me.) It's rare, when "Nostalghia" is not a thesis film nor an artistic formulation of self indulgent "revolution" or inspiration. I could sound hypocritical when, as I said before, the "matters of the faith" have fallen out of importance for me, and probably a worthy film as "Leaving Las Vegas" could turn out more fulfilling or entertaining in some form. Fortunately, throughout the nineties, films from exotic locations (China, most notably) have turned out as a learning experience of spirituality for the occidental moviegoer who falls out for such pitiful works as "The Fight Club", and recent shameful Academy Awards pics. "The most important movie?" Nobody can give a fair answer, and I'm not a spiritual person, but honestly I think that with "Nostalghia", Tarkovsky should gain a fair place among Welles, Eiseinstein and Ingmar Bergman, who without hesitation, had called the russian filmmaker, if not the most important, simply "the greatest". Even if it's not my favourite film of all, I can't forget what I felt when I watched "Nostalghia" for the first time as an important cinematographic experience; personally, more valuable than "Citizen Kane" and "Un chien andalou".