Nostalgia review – Tarkovsky’s yearning cine-poem is deeply mysterious and profound

This is a review of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1983 film Nostalgia, an Italy-set masterwork now returning to cinemas, praised as a mysterious and profound "cine-poem" about alienation and yearning. The critic frames its title as capturing a longing for something beyond the present moment, rather than simple homesickness, and situates the film within Tarkovsky's collaboration with Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra, who had previously worked with Fellini and Antonioni.

The story follows Andrei (Oleg Yankovskiy), a Russian scholar researching a fictional composer in Tuscany, who suffers an emotional breakdown while haunted by monochrome memories of home. His interpreter Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano) grows frustrated by his detachment, while both become fascinated by Domenico (Erland Josephson), a local figure once committed for imprisoning his family in fear of apocalypse, who now believes carrying a lit candle across the town's baths could save humanity. The review highlights the film's shift from rural Tuscany to Rome in its third act, drawing a comparison to a similar structural turn in Tarkovsky's earlier Ivan's Childhood.