So this is a weird one. Andrei Tarkovsky is a famous Russian director, right? Right. But this is an Italian movie, because after some Soviet censorship, he ended up leaving the country, making this movie in Italy and then another movie in Sweden.

But while you can take the director out of Russia, you can’t take the Russia out of the director. This is the least Italian movie made in Italy that I’ve seen, and I count spaghetti westerns in that. It’s deeply, dourly Russian to its core.

Tarkovsky’s sense of self-imposed exile really comes through in the early parts of the film, which is about a Russian writer going to Italy to research a Russian musician who had lived in Italy. The main character is homesick, and tells his Italian translator that translation is worthless, and that they understand nothing of Russia.

For a while, I was thinking this was going to be one of the most straightforward Tarkovsky movies, because it was focused on the character interaction between the writer and his translator, and everything that was going on was easily understandable. I mean, sure, there were some dream sequences and a sort of mystic sequence and a dog that appears out of nowhere, but fundamentally.

But by the second half of the movie, haha, nope. The movie is extremely effective at setting a mood of ominous tranquility; every shot is stunning; and individual scenes are moving. But what does it all mean, and how does it all tie together? I don’t know, it completely lost me.

I think this one is a lot more in the Mirror vein, where you need to go into it as a kind of cinematic poem, not trying to put a straightforward narrative onto it, but just letting its emotions and visuals do the work.