Tarkovsky had a remarkable ability to balance and oppose images. As I think about it, the wife rolling on the floor in despair has to be balanced against the man rolling in the proverbial clover. His “happiness”, in his dream world, is bought at the expense of hers and their daughters. And then, it is plastic. He winds up back in bed, where he started. Bed, rolling, rolling, bed. There is sleep, too, in the middle, that was not there in the beginning, nor in the end. There is a deep structure in this thing that he likely mapped out.
The dog, in my view, goes with the daughter: a source of love and happiness he fails to see.
Finally, I wanted to note that this movie likely killed not just Tarkovsky, but many of the people on the crew. Many if not most of them got cancer from the literal poisons in the place they chose to film this movie. The drifting white flakes, that added so much atmosphere, were toxins that just happened to be there.
One could go in many directions with this symbolically. It is the first film I know of that killed most of its participants.
Rather, though, I think I will go back to the film itself. Water is a very common thematic element in Tarkovsky. There were a number of scenes in Nostalghia in which it was prominent, always or often in decaying, decrepit structures, whose roofs no longer protect against it.
Water can mean many things–and the beauty of unexplained art is that I can come up with ones he never intended, and derive use from that process–but here I think it is the intrusion of doubt. It connotes a sensation of sleeping, and not living. It is a dreamland, where what we hope comes into being, as does what we fear. It is mutable. It flows, and it collects.
I’m speaking out loud. I think I would need to watch the movie again to pull more out. I do think the film could be described as a symbolic polyphony–polysymbolism, perhaps? Richly textured, mythic.
Ah, life calls.