Nostalgia

A Russian writer researching in Italy follows the traces of an eighteenth century composer. He has a translator with him and still cannot make himself understood to anyone. The film gives exile not as a political condition but as a physical exhaustion. The narrative does not advance; the shots lengthen, and near the close a man walking a candle from one end of an empty pool to the other without letting it go out takes almost nine minutes. That scene is the whole film. It is the first film Andrei Tarkovsky made outside the Soviet Union, and he did not return home after it. It won a prize at Cannes. Who it's for: those who like very slow, almost eventless cinema. Who it's not for: viewers who want a narrative to follow; the film abandons story deliberately.