Okay, here's the thing. And before judging me I encourage anyone to look at my profile to see wether my taste is poor or not.
Andrei Tarkovsky made seven films, and I took the liberty to watch them all. I liked Solaris. I understood Ivan's Childhood. I was fairly bored by The Mirror and severely bored by Stalker. But they all had something this movie didn't.
Nostalghia, his sixth feature film and the only one in Italy, is one of the worst films I've ever seen. Because it lacks the only thing that every other movie has: something. Nostalghia has nothing. It has no characters, it has no setting, it has no plot.
It does "have" them in a technical sense. You can go on Wikipedia and read a summary, sure. Yet, the problem is Tarkovsky doesn't take notice of any of them. It's alledegly about a writer that tries to study a composer. It isn't about that. Not that it should, but it isn't about anything else, really. Tarkovsky just SHOWS you some images he likes and you're supposed to do all the thinking. I'm fine with some thinking, but after the first 20 minutes of nothing I started to suspect maybe it's not my fault, maybe I'm not dumb, maybe I'm not the problem.
Because a film has to be balanced. It has to have some excuse, some distraction, to take you along its emotional or moral ride, it can't just be a speech about morality and a bunch of unrelated images. Nostalghia is that. Is the other end.
The characters have no lines. I swear they don't. They have only monologues, only poetry. But it's not good poetry. It's that sketchy, meaningless poetry that you find on a depressed 80-year old's dusty unpublished diary. You could interchange any of the character's lines between them and you wouldn't notice the difference. In fact, you could put the whole movie backwards and it wouldn't matter either.
Maybe is the fact that you could have some character interactions that are worth glancing act; maybe is the fact that you could have a sequence with multiple things happening at once to speed up the process. We are mistaking lazy with genius, and with enough steady camera anyone'll believe it. But no, the movie stuffs all of its characters with all the baggage of explaining the meaning of life every time they open their mouth, and then they stare at things for fifteen minutes. That is not what a good movie is made of.
The scene with Domenico's speech is terrible, because it's again poetry, that could've been put anywhere else in the movie, or viceversa, and nobody would've noticed. The constant shots of the protagonist's wife, again, they serve no purpose, they just kind of exist, like everything in this film. They only represent a vague sense of sadness that doesn't move anything forward; it doesn't go anywhere. The scene of the candle. By God, how frustratingly unimportant that scene is, it is not an experience, it is torture, because the so-called "build-up" to it isn't a build-up, it's just random rambling about it as a concept, there isn't any purpose to it.
He is trying too hard to depress you, make you feel like if he accomplishes it and taking credit for it as if that equals making a masterpiece.
The word "pretentious" is thrown around a lot when it comes to a certain type of cinema. I've seen Fellini and Bergman films and they have their touches of pretention. It doesn't ruin their movies, mostly, as it coincides with their goals, how they manage to tell their stories. But there's an air of pretention to Nostalghia that I've never seen in full display quite like it. And that's the prolem with it. It is only that: every conventional cliché about avant-garde movies rolled into one.
I don't care where you're from and how much of a mental disorder you might have, nobody talks or walks that slow. Life is not that slow. A good movie has to have both fast and slow moments to achieve a momentum that it can then submit to reflection. Tarkosvky films are generally pure reflection with none of the things that make storytelling interesting. A good script, a fleshed-out character, a mystery to be solved.
I've seen it before, and many of his movies do this. But here, it is disrespectful to the viewer, I feel, to a point to which I cannot cut any slack. It is one of the most disrespectful movies I've ever seen. Because under this vail of slow-moving, big-brain lies, it shames the viewer into thinking there is something to it, when there absolutely isn't. It is an impossibly boring movie, with nothing to offer, that stretches out to two hours in length.
Andrei Tarkovsky made seven films, and I took the liberty to watch them all. I liked Solaris. I understood Ivan's Childhood. I was fairly bored by The Mirror and severely bored by Stalker. But they all had something this movie didn't.
Nostalghia, his sixth feature film and the only one in Italy, is one of the worst films I've ever seen. Because it lacks the only thing that every other movie has: something. Nostalghia has nothing. It has no characters, it has no setting, it has no plot.
It does "have" them in a technical sense. You can go on Wikipedia and read a summary, sure. Yet, the problem is Tarkovsky doesn't take notice of any of them. It's alledegly about a writer that tries to study a composer. It isn't about that. Not that it should, but it isn't about anything else, really. Tarkovsky just SHOWS you some images he likes and you're supposed to do all the thinking. I'm fine with some thinking, but after the first 20 minutes of nothing I started to suspect maybe it's not my fault, maybe I'm not dumb, maybe I'm not the problem.
Because a film has to be balanced. It has to have some excuse, some distraction, to take you along its emotional or moral ride, it can't just be a speech about morality and a bunch of unrelated images. Nostalghia is that. Is the other end.
The characters have no lines. I swear they don't. They have only monologues, only poetry. But it's not good poetry. It's that sketchy, meaningless poetry that you find on a depressed 80-year old's dusty unpublished diary. You could interchange any of the character's lines between them and you wouldn't notice the difference. In fact, you could put the whole movie backwards and it wouldn't matter either.
Maybe is the fact that you could have some character interactions that are worth glancing act; maybe is the fact that you could have a sequence with multiple things happening at once to speed up the process. We are mistaking lazy with genius, and with enough steady camera anyone'll believe it. But no, the movie stuffs all of its characters with all the baggage of explaining the meaning of life every time they open their mouth, and then they stare at things for fifteen minutes. That is not what a good movie is made of.
The scene with Domenico's speech is terrible, because it's again poetry, that could've been put anywhere else in the movie, or viceversa, and nobody would've noticed. The constant shots of the protagonist's wife, again, they serve no purpose, they just kind of exist, like everything in this film. They only represent a vague sense of sadness that doesn't move anything forward; it doesn't go anywhere. The scene of the candle. By God, how frustratingly unimportant that scene is, it is not an experience, it is torture, because the so-called "build-up" to it isn't a build-up, it's just random rambling about it as a concept, there isn't any purpose to it.
He is trying too hard to depress you, make you feel like if he accomplishes it and taking credit for it as if that equals making a masterpiece.
The word "pretentious" is thrown around a lot when it comes to a certain type of cinema. I've seen Fellini and Bergman films and they have their touches of pretention. It doesn't ruin their movies, mostly, as it coincides with their goals, how they manage to tell their stories. But there's an air of pretention to Nostalghia that I've never seen in full display quite like it. And that's the prolem with it. It is only that: every conventional cliché about avant-garde movies rolled into one.
I don't care where you're from and how much of a mental disorder you might have, nobody talks or walks that slow. Life is not that slow. A good movie has to have both fast and slow moments to achieve a momentum that it can then submit to reflection. Tarkosvky films are generally pure reflection with none of the things that make storytelling interesting. A good script, a fleshed-out character, a mystery to be solved.
I've seen it before, and many of his movies do this. But here, it is disrespectful to the viewer, I feel, to a point to which I cannot cut any slack. It is one of the most disrespectful movies I've ever seen. Because under this vail of slow-moving, big-brain lies, it shames the viewer into thinking there is something to it, when there absolutely isn't. It is an impossibly boring movie, with nothing to offer, that stretches out to two hours in length.