Stalker

"Stalker"

Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979

This film is a science-fiction tale about the "Zone," the site of a meteorite impact in Russia that is, according to legend, a source of mysterious and other-worldly powers. The area has been cordoned off by the police for decades; however, there is a small, illicit business where a guide, nick-named a "Stalker," attempts to lead dejected people to a room within the Zone where their innermost wishes come true.

We follow one Stalker, a tired-looking man who has emerging patches of gray hair, and one of his ventures into the Zone with two men who are simply referred to as the Writer and the Professor. We learn that this Stalker lived within the Zone when the meteorite struck, leaving his newborn daughter a mutant without any legs. Since then, his entire life has centered around the Zone, which has become his obsession and his home, unlike the shack, located within a depressing, unnamed industrial city, that his family now resides in.

This film is a challenging experience, a hefty journey in which we enter a world where sounds and images are, at once, alien and familiar. The initial shots, in which the Stalker dutifully prepares to go into the Zone early in the morning, have a striking sepia-toned and high contrast aesthetic. His every-day existence is a depressing one, where all signs of life appear to have been drained from the image. Sounds are given a peculiar treatment, as if the noises have been detached from the objects and the people that produce them - footsteps echo with eerie, electric-like modulations, for example. There is one sequence that I find particularly captivating. The three men, having run past the police outposts, ride into the Zone on a railroad track. For five minutes, Tarkovsky's camera focuses only on these characters' visages, looking ahead into the unknown; all the while, we hear only a beautiful, bizarre synthesizer whose rhythm simulates that of the mechanized handcart they ride on.

Suddenly, the camera switches to a first-person perspective, and we witness the Zone for the first time. The lighting changes entirely, the world is now presented in color, and we hear only organic noises; the synthesizer fades away like a phantom. The sequence is similar to that of "The Wizard of Oz," where Dorothy steps out of her house into the unfamiliar, from her monochromatic world to a vividly colored one. When comparing the two directly, "Stalker's" sequence remains the more powerful and haunting - the Zone's desolate beauty and its underlying hint at danger are what make the film's atmosphere so complex and engaging. These characters seek something better, and they are so desperate that they are willing to venture into the Zone - which, despite appearing much more lively than the sepia-toned environment of their everyday existence, has the capacity to kill people - in order to find that ultimate sense of solace.

We discover that the Zone is a treacherous place that is filled with many traps, though not in the physically-harmful tradition of most science-fiction films; they are, instead, intellectual challenges, in which the group of men become trapped in their own anguish. Tarkovsky presents this in an interesting manner, often leaving many minutes without any dialogue while our protagonists, shot in extreme long shot or in extreme closeup, struggle through the wilderness. Then, the characters, for minutes on end, engage in a number of fascinating soliloquies - the Zone's traps, we eventually realize - in which they debate about the values of their lives.

Deeper down, this is an allegorical tale about belief, about people who are disillusioned with what the world has given them, and their efforts to discover what makes their lives worth living. The film poses many questions, especially in the last half-hour, that are nearly impossible to answer. Is the Zone a force of good or of evil? Of both? Though the Stalker reveres the Zone, is his zeal for the Zone's potential for goodness transferable to others? That is, can people's beliefs and values retain the same meaning from individual-to-individual? Do people have choices in what they can believe in, or is that in itself an illusion? Whatever the answers, this is one hell of a film. It's aesthetically spell-binding, aurally inventive, beautifully written and acted, and an intellectual puzzle that I'm not even close to figuring out.

Rating: 10

First Viewed: 7/13/08, on a crappy Kino DVD
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