The Omen

One may wonder what would possess a director to remake a film scene-for-scene if that film did not have some kind of artistic appeal. The reasoning behind such a premise is woefully simple: only art can be re-enjoyed. The crash-bang-blow-up vehicles that continue to diminish our attention span draw the numbers they are supposed to attract then quietly subside, forever relegated to oblivion or lost amongst hundreds of clones. But art, true art, cannot be remade, although its sensation can indeed be reproduced. As opposed to the latest screen version of this controversial novel, Kubrick's opuscule was not so much an adaptation as a slender louver to a majestic gallery from which readers of the novel could discern little of the original (praise for the movie has in fact been scattershot, with some critics invariably convinced that older, plainer, and pruder is always the way to go). Yet despite its moral shortcomings, Lolita is still an artistic masterpiece with the fatal flaw of trying to sublimate pornography, a mistake that might be the caption for the entire twentieth century. Other good to great literary works have enjoyed intermittent revival because what lies at their heart – be it a moral lesson, an artistic vision, or something infinitely tragic and infinitely beautiful – is worth repeating and remembering. And while we gladly indulge ourselves in sweet memories when given the opportunity, sometimes it is important to recall other, darker materials within our world. And nothing is more powerful than mantic mysteries in engendering fear and trembling. So do we step and behold this remake released ten years ago today.

We are taken into the family of thirtysomething Robert Thorn (Liev Schreiber), a tall, handsome, and successful American diplomat posted in Italy. He is there with his wife Katherine (Julia Stiles), ten years his junior and, as the film begins, pregnant with their first child. Even being unaware of the film's poorly kept secret, we understand that horror movies that commence with a birth will necessarily involve a terrible fate for all present, and the Thorns' predicament proves to be no exception. Mere moments after he is supposed to be basking in the bliss of fatherhood, Thorn is approached by the hospital's Catholic priest, Father Spiletto, who regrets to inform him that his son did not make it out the womb alive. Yet a solution exists: Spiletto mentions a child whose mother did not survive his birth, and with a few smooth words about placating Katherine's desire to have a baby, the changeling is retrieved and bestowed. What is very curious about this revolting moral decision is Thorn's indifference to the origin of the baby's mother – admittedly, out of desperation not snobbery. One would think that given science's insistence on genetic disorders, tendencies, and determination, an educated modern man would be loath to accept a fatherless child in a foreign maternity ward. But this twist has nothing to do with Thorn's noble intentions. The conceit is clearly designed as a choice: Thorn elects to bring the child he will call Damien into his home and in so doing, seals the destiny of all parties involved. Katherine is happy, he no longer has a spouse to comfort, and he can turn his attention back to what interests him most, namely his career.

Damien ages and nothing seems awry; we see the blissful trio doing blissful family things, giggling warmly all the while. By the time his son is five, Robert has been appointed Deputy Chief of Mission to the American Embassy in London, a rather fantastic feat for so young a diplomat. But then again, perhaps he's had some help along the way – and more help is coming. At precisely 6:06:06 am, the Ambassador perishes in a freak road accident with an oil tanker, leaving Thorn, still in his thirties, as the "youngest Ambassador in American history." A large estate outside of London awaits the Thorns who decide on a gala celebration of Damien's fifth birthday. Now about this Damien character. As I child I was always lectured about how horrible it was to expose underage actors to the trauma and nightmarish scenes so commonly incident to films involving evil, human or superhuman. Evidence for this edict is tremendous: so many young actors, having run and screamed from phantom killers their whole childhood, turn to drugs and other insidious outlets and end up ruining their lives in toto. Who knows what will befall Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick; one hopes his fate will be kinder than that of so many of his predecessors. In any case, the lad is convincing in his irreverence towards the rules of the adult world. When his nanny commits suicide in his name at said gala event, he is neither as proud as a devil nor as scared as a child. No, this little beast couldn't care less about what happens to this nanny, as he is duly aware of the coming of another, the malefic Mrs. Baylock (Mia Farrow).

There are other odds and ends: a photographer (David Thewlis) whose work contains hints of how his subjects might meet their maker; a barbiturate-addled priest (Pete Postlethwaite) who chants weird verse of impending doom and claims to have seen Damien's birth mother; and the scholar Bugenhagen (Michael Gambon) who knows something about killing a demon. A few amendments to the original script are made – mostly, as it were, visual inserts – such as a series of nightmares that plague Thorn (one involves the slow closing of a bathroom cabinet mirror; I will leave it at that) and an allusion to the cowled figure in this film previously reviewed here. What ultimately takes place is far less surprising than the sidelights into what may have spawned this diabolical situation: the topical allusions at the film's beginning to recent natural and manmade disasters; calling upon Father Spiletto, who has survived a mysterious fire in the hospital that cost him his speech and half his face, in a lazaretto; the graveyard that Spiletto indicates the photographer and Thorn might want to visit (there is also a subsequent dream sequence with a hideously animate Spiletto cackling in a way that will hurt your sleep); and the identity of Damien's biological mother. The photographer and priest provide a sturdy contrast of what cannot be denied owing to photographic evidence and what cannot be empirically ascertained, because faith inherently means there is no ocular proof. It is this coin that the Thorns decide to flip, with unfortunately no winning scenario on either side. If the Thorns are a shade too young (Gregory Peck and Lee Remick were each substantially older than their counterparts in the original) it is both to appeal to a more adolescent crowd and underscore that meteoric rises might be owed to other shooting stars. Or other light bearers.

The Usual Suspects

A significant incentive to return to a fine book or film is what has been forgotten, what has been distorted by time's ruthless grip. Over the years the work will surface and resurface on memory's golden pond and we learn that what we once thought of it has more or less disappeared. Perhaps the work was enjoyed when we were still too young to distinguish first-rate art from its shadowy imitators; perhaps that part of our life has simply been closed and we have moved on to another concept of reality. Yet some works will always beckon. Some displays of genius will always linger and aid in our definition of art itself. We cannot pretend that a large number of the books and films in this world deserve such scrutiny; in fact, worthy are but a small percentage; rarer still are those that can be enjoyed again and again until our days darken. We also cannot claim that this film ranks among the most eternal because, after all, Hollywood has had its hand in it, and that means compromises. But even with a few minor flaws, and even knowing the path of its crooked turns, it is still undeniably entertaining.

We begin "last night" in San Pedro, California, aboard a doomed vessel aflame in an otherwise peaceful harbor. Aboard this boat – ostensibly a cargo ship, although from the look of things, its cargo could be corpses – lies a severely injured man (Gabriel Byrne) cradling a cigarette which will be his last. Above him, obscured by shadows and a regrettably coy camera angle, stands another man who calls him "Keaton," and whom he addresses, with some bitter irony, as "Kaiser." The separation is notable since another character will persist in the belief that the same mortal form inhabits both identities. The Kaiser shall light one more cigarette before finishing his dirty work on board (time for his chat with Keaton was bought by urinating on a lighted wick), left for the LAPD to mop up the next day. That morning five known felons are, in the words of one of the criminals, Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey), "brought in on a trumped-up charge to be leaned on by half-wits." Our title does not promise highly developed characters; and, indeed, apart from Kint, who will also serve as our narrator, we have some standard underworld cutouts: McManus (Stephen Baldwin), the high-strung psycho killer; Fenster (Benicio del Toro), McManus’s mellow, often incomprehensible sidekick; Hockney (Kevin Pollak), the sardonic chorus; Kint, a victim of cerebral palsy and the one we should pity – a perfect choice for a narrator; and Keaton, the Irish-accented 'dean' of criminals, and a disgraced former cop who may or may not have gone straight. The film's episodic first half details the events of the weeks following the police lineup, peppered all the while with some delightfully brash noir dialogue (the best being McManus's version of the lineup reading and Hockney's response to "I can put you in Queens on the night of the robbery"). The atmosphere, while murderous at times, is imbued with a certain light-heartedness; even when McManus skeptically recurs to Keaton's new 'clean' life with a big shot lawyer as his girlfriend (Suzy Amis), we all chuckle along, albeit not as unhingedly as McManus. But the oddity persists: rare is it, as Keaton points out, that five convicted felons occupy the same lineup (the second vignette is indeed entitled "Rounding up ..." since The Usual Suspects was named after this famous film). Odder still is that the cops seem to have nothing on these guys whatsoever. Which brings us back to that boat.

The federal agent investigating the vessel's demise is Jack Baer (Giancarlo Esposito) – not to be confused with this fictional character – a friend and colleague of customs special agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri). Kujan and Baer will eventually convene and share notes. But for the time being, for that fateful morning, their stories will run on parallel tracks. Kujan will lock himself in a police station office to interrogate Kint; Baer will track down the only other known survivor of the incident, a hospitalized Hungarian sailor with burns over sixty percent of his body who boldly claims to have seen "the Devil." And who is this Devil? You may remember Keaton's odd appellation for a German emperor in our first reel: the person the sailor purports to have seen is Keyser Söze, and his origin may never really be resolved, which could easily have diminished the film's value. A hazy flashback shows Söze, an absolutely ruthless Turkish gangster, handling some Hungarian competitors in a manner that shocks even them (and explains, it is implied, the role of the Hungarian crew aboard the burning ship). Over time Söze has become the bogeyman to outlaws everywhere ("A spook story criminals tell their kids at night") with a network so volatile and multifaceted that the United States Government, among other entities, would give practically anything to find someone who could identify him. The sailor, a man not long for this world, complies with Baer's wishes and begins to describe the Devil to a police artist, who, of course, will take her sweet time in composing her subject. My strict non-disclosure policy prevents me from revealing what part of the drawing we get to see. Yet if we adhere to the characters and their appearances during the film, one detail is impossible – and we should leave matters right there.

Much noise has surrounded the dénouement of The Usual Suspects, perhaps justifiably so, although the final scene is more shocking in its celerity than its content. What is noticeable, however, is that throughout the film certain characters say and do things that they shouldn't, either because they cannot possibly know what they claim or because their reactions betray inappropriate emotions. Upon a reviewing, these moments seem so painfully obvious that we wonder why we didn't come to the same conclusions initially. Is the plot very complicated? Not really; it is certainly tortuous, but such plots lend credence to the suspicion that a criminal mind is built differently than that of a law-abiding citizen and, with the rare exception, every criminal existence will ultimately be captioned in that famous Hobbesian pentaptych ending in 'short.' We should also note, pace certain reviews, that Kint and Kujan spend the film not in Kujan's office, but the messy sty of one of Kujan's colleagues (an extremely important point, although not ours to say why). But the core of The Usual Suspects is the fact that Kujan wants to hear one story and Kint spins him another. Kint has a few scenes in which Keaton appears and defends his girlfriend’s honor, yet Kujan only wants to hear about Keaton, "the cold-blooded bastard" he's been "investigating for three years"; the Keaton who "was indicted seven times when he was on the force" (including on three counts of murder); the Keaton all of whose state witnesses "either reversed their testimony or died"; the Keaton who himself allegedly "died in a warehouse fire two years ago." Unfortunately, Byrne is for whatever reason one of the world's least convincing criminals, perhaps because he always seems above daily chit-chat (he works well as a Biblical Satan, or Lord Byron, or a wicked nobleman, but as a common criminal and NYC cop – no way in hell or heaven). So when his girlfriend is threatened, or when he is seen enjoying her company, he is convincing. But he is no hoodlum. Is that the intent? One cannot imagine it is, and if you've seen Byrne and his amazingly limited range you know 'brooding lover' is really the only tune in his jukebox. And we didn't even mention the man known as Kobayashi.

The Ghost Writer

Near the midway point of this film the title character chides his bathroom mirror reflection with two emphatic words: "bad idea." His immediate reference is revealed shortly thereafter, but the caption is applicable to the whole, rather preposterous venture into the life and reputation – those two imposing statues occupying opposite ends of the same garden – of another man. And that man, and the subject of our Ghost's book, is former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). 

That our Ghost (Ewan McGregor) is never granted the dignity of a name is just as well; for all intents and purposes, he has never existed. As the film opens we meet him greedily tippling with his agent as the two rehash Lang's meteoric rise ("He wasn't a politician, he was a craze"), punctuated by the agent's revelation that the former resident of "Number 10" no longer has anyone to write up his amazing life. The reason? His long-time aide and ghost writer Michael McAra was found washed up on the beaches of Martha's Vineyard just last week, the victim, it would appear, of imbibing far too long into a dark night and leaning even longer over a ferry's rail. As the Ghost, who drinks as if his liver were already spectral, realizes what his agent is suggesting, he falls quiet and hesitant. I believe business seminars refer to such moments as the "golden ticket." So why is the Ghost not on the next plane to the United States, where Lang still seems to be treated like a head of government? Perhaps because to do so he must endure the scrutiny of the publisher who rejected his last work, Lang's lawyer, and the publishing house's American envoy, all of whom have their doubts about this young man who could easily pass for a booze-addled drifter. Our Ghost gets the job, of course, and as he sits alone at a Heathrow bar he sees a breaking news story on why Lang may have wanted to go to one of the handful of countries who do not abide by the International Criminal Court's demands for extradition.

A brief aside on the film's blunt political agenda: most reviewers of The Ghost Writer will chuckle knowingly at its roman-à-clef aspects, which are about as subtle as a zeppelin, but we have better things to do. Topicality is the surest means to sell a work – our Ghost starred in a mass-market paperback in Britain a few years ago – and to be utterly obliterated by history, precisely the opposite aims of great art. What we should really enjoy is the relationship between one of the most famous men in the world, a nameless, fameless compatriot, and that famous man's wife Ruth (Olivia Williams). We are supposed to concur that Ruth has everything a discerning man could want – intelligence, grace, pedigree, and, while no match for her spouse's hunkiness, a certain amount of sex appeal – and we do because a laconic plain Jane would make for ludicrous satire. The first time we hear Ruth she is screaming offstage; but the first time we see her, she is leaning out-of-focus against a distant door's threshold watching the newly arrived ghost writer shake his head at McAra's manuscript. "As bad as that?" she asks coyly, a plausible way for a wife to take an interest in another man's criticism of her husband, because if he can astutely criticize her spouse's life in print, it might be easier for her to allow him other irreverences. Brosnan has long since been an actor limited by his looks (we tend to think very attractive people are somehow secretly incompetent); as Lang, however, he becomes a husband limited by his political recognition. He simply cannot care too much for his domestic crisis because statesmen of his rank have more historic agendas to pursue. It is then of little surprise that when the Ghost sets about a total rewrite of McAra's three hundred pages and asks Lang how he entered politics, Lang reveals a quaint story about Ruth and Lang's first meeting as they pamphleted Labour tenets in the rain. The problem is that this story, as the Ghost will learn subsequently, is a wholesale fabrication. 

Why would Lang lie to his ghost writer who was seeking with all due sincerity to humanize his subject? An excellent question, and one not lost on our Ghost. As such, he begins sniffing around the Langs' current residence, a beachfront property belonging to yet another well-connected friend and discovers, well, that everything seems normal. If a bit too much so. It is only at his nearby hotel, when a strange older Brit interrupts the otherwise solitary alcoholic with some direct questions about the whereabouts of a certain ex-Prime Minister, that we observe the first true manifestation of our Ghost's doubts. The man disappears after muttering a rude epithet, and the Ghost is not sure he actually existed until the man barks at his car window a couple of days later as the ghostwriter and ghostwritten negotiate their way through an irate pack of protesters outside that same beachfront property. There is also a fourth side to this love trapezoid, Lang's fetching factotum Amelia Bly (Kim Cattrall), who does all the things dutiful mistresses are supposed to do including valiantly sidestepping Ruth's public jabs. When the twenty-four-hour news cycle announces that the British government has promised to comply fully with the requests of the ICC, Lang and his team realize that he should make haste to Washington to remind the average news cycle viewer of just what a craze he once was. He takes with him of course not Ruth, whose political advice he has "always followed, until lately," but Amelia, who is apparently married to someone who also might as well be a phantom. This leaves the Ghost all alone in the house with some security personnel, the cook, the gardener, a three-hundred page manuscript about a renowned stranger, and a very neglected former Prime Minister's wife.     

While drinking is too often mistaken for a personality trait by modern writers, we may smile or frown at its metaphorical similarity to McAra's fate as well as to the crimes for which Lang is being held accountable. Indeed, more than occasionally do we get the sense that the current Ghost is literally stepping on the same slippery stones as his predecessor, once even going so far as to use the GPS in McAra's car to reconstruct the dead man's last route. Yet as opposed to McAra, who was Lang's long-time political confidant, our Ghost doesn't really have any cerebral investment in politics. He views it, as far too many do, as something out of his control, a back-slapping, gold-grubbing country club that manages things along in that uneventful, comfortable status quo so commonly incident to developed countries. Perhaps that is why he is at first impressed by the mysterious figure of Paul Emmett (Tom Wilkinson), a Harvard professor who seems to have known Lang at Cambridge. Emmett is supposed to be a Yankee yet Wilkinson's accent cannot possibly be construed as standard – one begins to think he is speaking in code.  His vowels may be more or less American, but his cadence is distinctly British. Emmett also utters in perfect seriousness a four-word sentence that is so grossly illiterate as to make us think twice about the degrees on his "wall of ego." If both these mishaps are intentional signals, they are absolutely brilliant; if this is someone's notion of Ivy League superiority, it is an unmitigated disaster. Are these oddities in any way related to Lang's addressing the Ghost only as "man," a blatant Americanism? And could any publisher possibly expect a three-hundred page rewrite within a month and not be concerned about an inferior product? Living up to his name, our Ghost seems rather indifferent to all these terrestrial matters, although at one point he calls the household whose story he has come to tell, "Shangri-La in reverse." But I think we all know better definitions of hell. 

The White Ribbon

There is a subtle trick in this film that may not be readily apparent because we are accustomed as cinéastes to cosmic tricks, sleights-of-hand that cover everything hitherto seen and heard with a new coat. What is the point of such chicanery if it will result in no better understanding of the world it inhabits? Ah, but it does improve understanding, although what we learn constitutes but the first link on a very long and brutal chain. 

The setting, as you may learn from any reliable summarist, is Northern Germany in the year 1913. Even superficial students of history will note that this may have been the last normal annum in Germany's existence until the reunification of its as yet uncleft halves almost eight decades later. As the film begins we do not necessarily know the date (a news item much later on will give it away), but it is obvious from the rusticity of our setting – the candlelight, the carriages, the fiefdom of the obligatorily procacious Baron (Ulrich Tukur) – that it takes place in a world long since forlorn. Our narrator is the former village teacher (Christian Friedel) who remains anonymous throughout thanks to German forms of address that allow him to be known simply as Herr Lehrer. His voiceover, however, has the cadence and irony of a much older man; we soon learn he is recollecting, perhaps with some fuzziness, the happenings of the past. Nevertheless, at the time of the "inexplicable events" our Teacher is thirty-one, soft-spoken, and charmingly awkward. He is also a lifelong bachelor although greatly enamored by the Baron's seventeen-year-old nanny Eva (Leonie Benesch), and indeed their scenes together are distinct in their tenderness. They will represent the last hope in a realm already given over to the vermin. And there is no greater rat than the village Doctor (Rainer Bock).        

As the film opens the Doctor is nearly killed tumbling off his horse; unfortunately, he will make a full recovery. Our narrator dutifully announces that what tangled the animal's legs was a thin, invisible wire that no one had ever seen before or since. The Doctor's reappearance about halfway through the film confirms a handful of unsavory suspicions, especially concerning his miserable neighbor and understrapper Ms. Wagner (Susanne Lothar). Even superficial students of German literature know better than to trust a doctor and a sidekick called Wagner, who has long since tended to all the Doctor's personal and professional needs (even, it is implied, before the death in childbirth of the Doctor's wife five years back) while raising her own mentally handicapped son Karli; that she is primarily a midwife and so referenced in the credits should tell you all you need to know. The Doctor's near-fatal accident turns out, as it were, to be but the first in a series of calamitous occurrences: a farmer's wife falls through some rotted wood in a barn attic and perishes; Sigi, the son of the Baron is abducted and savagely mistreated; the farmer's son razes an entire cabbage patch on the Baron's estate to protest his overlord's negligence; soon thereafter, the selfsame barn is burnt to the ground; and perhaps most horrifyingly, Karli is brutalized to the point of having his vision endangered. We witness only the fate of the cabbages, and only their suffering will be avenged. We also know the perpetrator in the impalement of the pastor's (Burghart Klaußner) bird, yet a very bad conscience seems to have been the only punishment inflicted.

Which brings us to another point: we may associate German wickedness with Faust and more recently with the dozen ignominious years that finally persuaded Europeans to put aside their differences, but these are not artistic implications. Karli is blinded because he alone can see the truth of his parentage but cannot speak; Sigi is injured so that his mother can escape the effete Baron, go to Italy, and find a new man (a gossipy scene mistakenly whispers that it is the Baron who was in Italy); the Doctor is viciously dismounted for trotting between familiar trees (therein could one also detect some sexual symbolism, but that is for computerized minds to ponder); and the death of the farmer's wife is remarkable in exposing the personality of her husband. Yet these crimes are neither symbolic nor factitious, as crimes so often are in fiction; instead they are real but not quite solvable, as crimes so often are in reality. This jarring disconnect with fictional conventions may lead a certain type of viewer to proclaim triumphantly that only two short decades later – the proverbial generation – Germans and fascists would become synonymous and Europe would teeter over its blackest abyss. You would not be wrong in such an assertion – the white arm-band will distinctly recur to a fascist appurtenance – but such an interpretation limits the nuances of other sidelights, and perhaps we have already said enough. 

The film's German title may be rendered as The White Ribbon: a German children's tale, and the children are a vital element, in no small part because there are so many of them that they become hard to distinguish as individuals. It is the pastor's children who are pinioned in a white ribbon arm-band to remind them of the virtues from which they have all too frequently drifted away, but the ribbons themselves rarely appear on camera. We are for many reasons invited to suspect the children of committing some if not all of the crimes, but scenes of cruelty are interspersed with touches of sweetness and innocence (the latter embodied by the pastor's youngest son). The magnificent scene in which the Doctor's son learns about the word "dead" is amazing in how logically and clearly the child proceeds from one assumption to another. Once he deduces everything he feels, quite rightly, betrayed, and we consider the first real time we as children understood that all of us would eventually have to die. But the film is not about children's mortality, nor even about their oppression in a German system that did not tolerate individualism from the young. Our village is not like other villages: most villages have their villagey ways, but this village has a tendency of being unpredictably cruel in a manner that hints at a malevolent air or curse, as if it were infiltrated with the very fumes of hell. Without giving more away, we should consider the following questions. What advantage is gained from having an old man tell the story of his youth? What advantage is derived from making the narrator a teacher who is not native to this village? What two minor details could not possibly have occurred? You may also think of how someone of some culture and intellectual curiosity would define the use of the past. I fear that last sentence might be a bit vague, but that would be in keeping with the initial effect of The White Ribbon, which upon review becomes painfully and shockingly clear like a pair of field glasses slowly capturing the face of the distant enemy. As one young character observes after traipsing over a very rickety and very dangerous bridge: "God must like me, since He did not kill me when I gave Him the chance." As if such chances were restricted by our own actions.

Nostalghia

If you were to ask someone of nationalistic bent about the most untranslatable concepts in his mother tongue, he would invariably include a word or short phrase that denotes homesickness (or the much lovelier German analogue, Heimweh, 'home-woe,' of which nostalgia is said to be a calque). He would grudgingly admit that while homesickness is the closest English term, the two words actually lie very far apart. "You cannot really render it as aching for home," he might say, "it is more the yearning to breathe the air in the manner of its natives, air that exists nowhere else." The truth is that nostalgia has expanded its breadth of meaning: now it conveys as much a feeling of missing home as a glorification of the past in the sacrifice of the present and, often enough, of the future – a future that drifts ever further away from those golden years. I have had many instances in my life in which I felt wonderful events, times, and friends could never be repeated, and I was dreadfully right. They cannot and we cannot. What we have in their stead is the sensation of loss and the hope that redemption will allow us to enjoy those moments for eternity. And that is why the preservation of the human soul is the most vital function of culture. I do not for a minute believe that those who worship money and fossils and the materiality of this green globe can ever feel nostalgia: it is, with true love and true art, the deepest of sensations, and it is far beyond their ken as beasts of the moment. Nostalgia for the innocence of one's childhood, of love's labors lost, of the sweetness of things, of books, languages, sunsets, summer evenings of unstinting passion, the headiness of wine and the eternal mystery of our soul's whims – all this makes for an exquisite banquet of memories. It may also make, in the event of proper sidereal alignment, a first-rate Romantic poet. Which brings us to this remarkable film.

We begin with an Italian countryside, something not terribly evolved from what you might find in this animal-slaughtering favorite, a green and brown realm of plain rusticity. At the conspicuous center of our landscape stands a tree, Tarkovsky's eternal hope for the world; to the right and somewhat above the treetop, a power line in the shape of the greatest symbol we have ever known; in the background hills or mountains swimming amidst the mist. Slowly a small European car puffs its way left, the Italian sinistro, and stops before a garden leading up one of these misty hillocks, and a young, voluptuous redhead emerges, her hair in endless knots, first speaking Russian then Italian. As she climbs up the hill through a wondrous garden, the man mutters under his breath that he "can't go on." But he does. He follows her, onward and upward, to a chapel to gaze at a fresco by this famed artist. There our redhead, an Italian by the name of Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano), does not ask the chapel curator, likely a priest himself, why women flock to see the Madonna del Parto – that question is very obvious, and would belong in a lesser film. No, Eugenia well understands the despair of a woman who cannot bear children, or a mother whose daughter cannot bear a grandchild. What she wants to know is why they pray in the way they do, so fervently silent, then in a chant that culminates in a release of a bellyful of sparrows from the Madonna's statue. "Why are women more pious than men?" she asks, not incorrectly. The man pontificates a conservative view of women's role – to birth and raise children with patience and sacrifice – and as she walks away in half-feigned disgust, he adds: "You probably just want to be happy, but there is something in life more important than that." Eugenia stops and returns her eyes to all the mothers gathered, all praying to the one Mother, all beseeching that one of their daughters may bear children, a request punctuated by the opening of the belly. She does not look on transfixed, but simply curious. She is curious about her motherhood, about ritual, about all things that get lost in modernity's fire of independence and self-assertion. And suddenly she knows what word is more important in life than happiness.

The Italian for that word, fede, is not known to her companion, the poet Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky), so she translates it for him as vera (вера). She does not, however, convey the information with any solemnity, but with a snicker, and for good reason: fede means both faith and a wedding band, and Eugenia's mind is definitely much more focused on the latter. They converse in Italian (his insistence) even though it seems evident Eugenia's Russian would be more useful; then we consider that Italian may be the one trump card she holds over Gorchakov's Russian wife in Moscow. Indeed, her red hair, her role as his guide to the 'overworld,' and her painful sexual intrigue all denote temptation of the sinister kind and could have led – again, in a far lesser film – to carnal exploration. Yet somehow we know that this will never occur. In one vignette the camera – and, in turn, we and Gorchakov – notice Eugenia's pneumatic curves for what seems like the first time. His sudden compliment that she is so beautiful simply filters a hormonal reaction, and there is often something about very pure and sacrosanct places that shunts minds onto different tracks. Her expression for a few seconds thereafter communicates every ounce of her desire, the entire timeline of her pleasure at the compliment, her arousal, her disappointment when his eyes still do not meet hers, her arousal again, and finally her resignation that even if he did mean it, his comment was probably not enough for them to sleep together. Gorchakov, a melancholy and fatigued creature, has earned this disappointment: he has come to Italy to comprehend why Pavel Sosnovsky, a late eighteenth-century Russian composer, forsook the hills of Rome and a blossoming career to return to Russia and his status as a serf. Some say Sosnovsky loved a Russian serf girl, but some always say that. Others merely aver that he missed his homeland and would rather die enslaved in his native element than live on in exile – one of the most common interpretations of voluntary exile in modern thought. Ostensibly a well-known poet, Gorchakov exhibits more interest in the sadness of the locales he visits – chapels, churches, villages, and finally, these baths – than in any scholarly pursuits. He has not come to discover Sosnovsky's motives, he has come to find his own. His silly joke in Russian to a little Italian girl who could not possibly understand him is one of Nostalghia's iconic passages, in no small part owing to the resonance it receives in its closing shots. Yet at the time it smacks of cavalierness and frivolity, not nearly as sad as later events reveal it to be. Which can also be said about the third tragic figure in our triptych, the eccentric mathematician Domenico (a marvelous Erland Josephson).

It is probably best not to divulge too much about Domenico's backstory, which explains why apart from his outstanding mind and his German shepherd he is very much alone in the world. I stand corrected, there is a third companion: his fede, which is so strong as to augment at once his mathematical reasoning and his emotional pitch. The world simply does not add up. One drop of olive oil (in another much-discussed scene) and another drop of olive oil do not equal two drops, but one bigger drop. What we can say is that as we have three characters, so too do we have three dreams. First, there is Sosnovsky's, recounted in a letter (in Italian) as to why he needs to return to his birthplace. Sosnovsky was supposed to write an opera for his lord, and there were statues in the park where the opera was to be performed. As he approached the park he became one of the statues, and instinctively he knew that if he moved he would be severely punished. Thus, for a moment or a little longer, he actually turned to stone, powerless, and then realized that this was no dream at all, but his own bitter life. And he also realized that he could not forsake Russia, and the thought of not seeing its birches or languishing in the scents of his childhood grew intolerable. Then there is Eugenia's dream, narrated to her Russian guest during a long monologue of frustration when it becomes clear that her desires will not be reciprocated. I need not describe it in detail; suffice it to say that it involves a worm in her hair that escapes under her wardrobe – the context suggests that she has already provided her dream with sufficient analysis. And then there is Gorchakov's dream, the dream he endures after he tells that little girl that little joke about rescuing someone from a pond. And what does he see in his dream? He sees himself as himself; he sees himself as Domenico; he sees churches and streets that were never his but somehow should have been; and he weighs the criteria on which we, consciously and unconsciously, base our notion of what is home. Many claim that for a poet home is his language, the world in which the gilded filaments of his conscience and intelligence fuse into the most sublime and elevated of human expression. So what does this have to do with birthplace or childhood? Haven't countless poets composed countless odes thousands of miles away from their natal fields? They most certainly have. But maybe it is better to ask whether those odes would have been written if those poets and fields had never parted.