Stalker

The Criterion Channel's movie of the week this week is Stalker, a film I've long heard about it but never saw. It was released in 1979, directed by Andre Tarkovsky. In a way, it is a Russian Wizard of Oz.

The premise of the film is simple: a mysterious area known as "The Zone" is place where the rules of time and space don't exist. It is guarded by government forces, but there is allegedly a room inside it that will grant someone their deepest wish. Men known as "stalkers" will guide others inside for a fee. The stalker here is Alexander Kaidonovsky who, despite his wife's pleas, takes two men inside. One is called the Writer (Anatoly Solynitsin), who wants to regain his inspiration and sell a lot of books, and the Professor (Nikolai Grinko) who says he wants to study the Zone and win a Nobel Prize.

Like The Wizard of Oz, the first part of Stalker is filmed in sepia tones, but once inside the Zone it switches to color. Also like The Wizard of Oz, it is a quest for something personal for each traveler, with the ultimate realization that they already have it, or really don't want it. The implication is that the Room will grant you your deepest wish, but you don't choose it, it is from your subconscious. We hear the story of another stalker, Porcupine, who has a dead brother, but his wish turns out to be money instead of bringing his brother back to life.

The Stalker throws things ahead of him to make sure there are no traps. They traverse through an eerily quiet abandoned industrial area (that prefigures Chernobyl) that contains dark, damp tunnels and a room full of sand dunes. The men, especially the Writer and the Professor, argue about philosophy. The Stalker tells them not to do things, but it's unclear how he knows these things, and sometimes they don't come out they way he thinks they will.(at a certain point, a phone rings, one of the funnier moments in a very serious film).

The film is long, and intentionally so. But it's not boring--once inside the Zone we, like the men in the film, await something bad to happen. It as if we are lulled into the film, taken in with tracking shots, like a long one that follows them on a rail car. The film has only 132 shots, far below the average film, which has several thousand. I watched it over two days--I might not have found sitting in a theater for two hours and forty minutes as enjoyable.

Stalker is described as a science fiction film, but it's not, really, and those expecting one may be disappointed. We never know where the Zone came from (a meteorite? Aliens?) and the film is low-tech. But it does deal with themes of many dystopian films, in that it looks like the people live in misery and dreary surroundings (it was filmed in Estonia). There is nothing as consistently bleak as a Russian film.

Notably, many of the cast died young. Tarkovsky died at 54, and two of the main actors died in their forties. It is thought that they were affected by toxic runoff from a nearby factory. It seems in keeping with the theme of the movie.