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STALKER
8/10
USSR
1979 : Andrei Tarkovsky : 161 minutes
Tarkovsky’s
own favourite among his films is a bizarre hybrid of Eraserhead and The
Wizard of Oz. In a relentlessly bleak industrial city (actually Tallinn,
Estonia), three men come together: Writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn), Professor
(Nikolai Grinko), Stalker (Nikolai Kaidansky).
Based
on the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Roadside Picnic - a misleadingly
mundane title, not least because hardly any food is consumed in the movie
- Stalker has an arrestingly original, aggresively metaphorical
premise. But, as ever with Tarkovsky, it isn’t so much about what happens
- this is largely a matter of subjective interpretation - but the way
he presents it to us. It’s like a distillation - though a rather lengthy
distillation - of his recurring themes and images.
A
rudimentary checklist: resonant classical music; dreamy poetic quotations;
Anatoly Solonitsyn as an anguished creative intellectual; extreme length;
nebulous story development; shifts between monochrome and colour sequences;
unexpected outbreaks of (black) humour; a startling opening; a fantastic
finale; an emphasis on nature - no horses this time, but we do get a remarkable
canine performer instead.
The
film is partly about modern urban man’s disastrous departure from nature.
Opening and closing sections in the city are murky monochrome, but in
the Zone everything is a startling green: not for nothing is Stalker
often described as Tarkovsky’s pre-Chernobyl eco-fable. As ever, Tarkovsky’s
camera is happiest trained on natural phenomena - especially water. One
of the Zone’s hazards is known, sarcastically, as the ‘Dry Tunnel’ - it
turns out to be a waterfall surging through the ruins of a house. The
film is full of remarkable tracking shots, including long, spectacular
sequence over a flooded floor, reeds drifting among the remnants of civilisation.
As
ever, Tarkovsky demands trust - more precisely, faith - from his
audiences. There are slow patches, or sections of what one of the
characters dismisses as ‘sociological drivel,’ which we have no choice
except to sit through. But this faith is exactly what the film is about
- it’s entirely possible that there are no actual dangers in the Zone,
and that the Room’s reputation is a result of urban superstition, perpetuated
by the Stalker, who could be as much storyteller as pathfinder (he’s the
most agonised, and also the most artistically sensitive, character on
show.) Writer and Professor strain against his continual warnings, but
mostly lack the nerve to strike out on their own - when Professor does
explicitly disobey Stalker’s instructions, to double back and retrieve
his rucksack, he suffers no ill-effects. At one stage a bird does
appear to vanish into a sand-dune, but it’s hard to be precise about exactly
what has happened. Tarkovsky maintains a careful balance - the power of
the Zone, like the movie, depends on what individuals bring to it.
And,
as ever, Tarkovsky repays this faith. He ends his movie with one of his
trademark long shots that couldn’t possibly be the work of any other director.
Stalker’s daughter, Monkey, is genetically deformed - she has no legs
- probably as a result of Zone radiation. But she has other, compensatory
powers, and in the film’s last shot she performs a silent act of psychokinesis
that, echoing an apparently innocuous shot from the start of the film,
is about as far away from the pyrotechnics of Carrie
and The Fury as it’s possible to imagine, silently manipulating
household objects to re-enact the achingly slow progress of the three
travellers through the Zone. A progress controlled by Fate? by the Zone?
by God? by Free Will? by this child? by Tarkovsky? All of the above, or
none? Stalker provides no answers, of course, just astonishing
questions, an astonishing way of looking the world.
25th
January, 2001
by Neil Young
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