Andrei Tarkovsky
Stalker

It's been several months since I watched Stalker.

The memory I hold of this film seems to mock time and space, and so, periodically it returns, like an invisible moon influencing the tides of my spirit.

A sad and decaying atmosphere welcomes us into the cold house of the stalker. He is a poor man who, however, possesses something that escapes others. The stalker is a guide, the one who knows the ways and behaviors of the zone.

There are various theories on how the zone originated, but its existence is not in doubt.

The zone appears to be a place like many others. With the help of a stalker, one can enter by overcoming its militarily controlled limits by the government and proceed within it by following absurd rules of conduct that only a stalker knows. The goal is to reach a room where it seems that any wish can be fulfilled.

The stalker thus becomes the one who guides people in realizing their dreams, the one who possesses the knowledge to access the place where hopes come true.

This is, for him, the value of his miserable existence, the bread of his spirit, the work that ennobles his soul.

This and much more is what will be put in crisis when he brings a scientist and a writer to the zone, who, upon reaching the end of the path, will refuse to enter the room, nullifying all the stalker's efforts.

But this is only the surface. Digging a little deeper, one can see how the director wished to represent the complexity of the relationship between spirituality (various beliefs, dreams, and hopes), and sciences (humanistic and mathematical), highlighting the contrasts man has erected between them.

Tarkovsky leaves many things still to explore, thus abandoning us in the unresolved doubt of embracing with the heart or dissecting with the mind, of being satisfied with the memories that certain visual sensations leave in our soul or trying to study, analyze, and decompose to arrive at a richer yet inevitably fragmented picture of the depiction.

I honestly don't know the answer and don't intend to seek answers either, I just want to highlight the brilliance of Tarkovsky, let myself be carried away again into the zone, with the eye guided by a magnificent cinematography in an original and surprising screenplay that takes us from the gray mire of an anonymous Russian town into the damp and surreal environments of the zone, leaving us with the hope that perhaps we too, one day, will enter that mysterious room.

P.S.: Despite feeling a strong need to rewatch this film, sensing that something remains unresolved, I preferred to write this review now, partly to maintain a certain detachment and out of fear of losing myself seeking other hidden meanings that perhaps are better left as such.