‘May everything come true. May they believe. And may they laugh at their passions…’
Andrei Tarkovsky is widely regarded as one of the most important filmmakers of the 20th century. His films Solaris and Stalker are beloved by cinephiles, and while I haven’t seen the former, the latter justifies its reputation. As a film that takes us on a journey to the heart of darkness in a similar way to Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece Apocalypse Now, Stalker is tough going in places, but its best moments offer some of the most dynamic examples of the capabilities of the moving image ever committed to film…
In a dystopian world, Alexander Kaidanovsky, the eponymous stalker, agrees to transport two men, a writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and a professor (Nikolai Grinko), to the “Zone” – a strange and mysterious place in which the normal rules of time and physics do not apply. At the heart of the “Zone” lies the “Room”, where all dreams come true.
Stalker is breathtakingly, beautifully shot. The sepia and monochrome look unlike anything else I’ve seen before, and the stark industrial landscapes and static long shots lend the film a surreal and ethereal aesthetic that is utterly unique. Tarkovsky’s dialogue, influenced by everything from the plays of Samuel Beckett to Lao Tse’s Tao Te Ching, is often spellbinding and always thought-provoking.
While this is a long and slow film (the average shot length is over a minute), it is never arduous. Indeed, I often found myself lost in the sheer audacity and inventiveness of Tarkovsky’s assured filmmaking and the excellent performances of the film’s central trio, with each of them often having to deliver long and complicated monologues. There is also a dog, so that’s nice.
Stalker is a challenging, difficult film, but it needn’t feel like homework – a truly singular work from one of cinema’s great auteurs.
