Nostalghia
Unspoken feelings are never forgotten.
In Tarkovsky’s first film made outside the USSR, a Russian expatriate wanders wintry Italian landscapes while returning in memory to his homeland, as an inspired madman finds the fate of the world hanging on a candle’s flight across a dry pool (one of cinema’s most agonizingly suspenseful sequences). A wide range of themes and obsessions all come together in an overwhelming final shot that is upon you before you realize it.