Tarkovsky’s penultimate film, his first made outside the Soviet Union, concerns a Russian musicologist working in Italy who longs for his homeland as he takes an interest in a wise fool and his radical political activism (Josephson, in a role that prefigures The Sacrifice). Evocative of the director’s emotional response to his own displacement, the landscapes, colors, and aging architecture of Italy and Russia are incorporated here into the subjective world of the characters’ melancholy, anxiety, and hope.