Andreij Tarkovskij
Stalker

This review is a personal tribute to Tarkovsky's work, it does not have the ambition to explain or interpret such a complex piece, which would require books and weeks of research.

The strict restrictions and control of culture in the Soviet Union did not prevent Russian cinema from expressing itself as a true form of modern art, as happened on "our" side of the Iron Curtain. It would be magnificent to compare our and their way of making and watching films, but I believe it would take a lifetime.

At the end of the seventies, the committed and controversial New Hollywood, a child of the American counterculture of the '60s, was about to be set aside by the "super directors" Spielberg or Lucas, in a return to entertainment cinema.

Conversely, in Russia, in the year of "Apocalypse Now," a director already great and established (behind him "Andrei Rublev" and "Solaris") makes a film that, in beauty and depth, reaches (surpasses?) the heights touched by Kubrick in his "2001: A Space Odyssey". The director is Andrei Tarkovsky, and the film is "Stalker."

A scientist and a writer hire a guide, the "Stalker," to enter the "zone," a mystical and dangerous place created by the fall of a meteorite, where it is said there is a room that fulfills every desire.

The stalker knows the zone and its traps and is willing to risk his life by bypassing the authorities' controls (the place is fenced and protected); he does it for money but mostly because he feels a mystical sense of belonging to the zone (he is the only one who does not feel the need to enter the room), as if it were the last temple of faith, the only region on earth where hope, freedom, and fantasy survive: outside the fence there is only industry, machines, misery, solitude.

But the two intellectuals plan to destroy everything: indeed, the room does not fulfill voluntary desires, but the most hidden and dark ones, and is therefore a threat to their cynical and rationalist thinking...

The alienating inhuman world outside is immersed in an industrial-post nuclear landscape; to the prayers of the stalker's wife begging him not to leave and not to get imprisoned (again), he responds "the whole world is now a prison"; the ochre-sepia-metallic photography is that of the outside, and becomes pale and hallucinated in the zone; in the zone, the artificial element, steel and concrete, are instead covered by vegetation, marshes.

The dialogues seem to come out of a Shakespearean play, where the protagonists' ideas clash, one searching for inspiration and the other for the Nobel; only the stalker keeps a shred of humanity ("beyond the wire they have taken everything from me, this place is the only thing I have left").

The film is strongly discouraged for those expecting action or adventure scenes. Indeed, it is really slow, with endless long takes, philosophical monologues, sophisticated music; yet the beauty of the images captures the viewer, who magnetically attracted experiences a sensation of completeness.

The ending, in particular, is disarming and leaves one stunned, the stalker's disabled daughter moving objects with her mind, with the background of the Ode to Joy.

The search for truth, fenced with barbed wire by man, parallels the search for beauty.