Metrograph

Tarkovsky’s penultimate film, and his first shot outside the USSR, channels the filmmaker’s own sense of displacement into the story of a homesick Russian poet (Oleg Yankovsky)—in Italy to do research on 18th-century Russian expatriate composer Pavel Sosnovsky—who becomes fixated on the messianic ambitions of a holy fool, Domenico (Erland Josephson), whom he encounters when visiting the Tuscan countryside, which is filmed by DP Giuseppe Lanci as a melancholy, sodden dreamscape in which our protagonist finds echoes of the distant homeland. “Delicate, selectively desaturated tones give the impression of a film simultaneously monochromatic and in color… [If] not Tarkovsky’s most personal film, it is arguably his most self-reflexive.” —J. Hoberman, The New York Times

Distributor: Kino Lorber