Reviewing a Classic Movie of the Twentieth Century
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Stalker
In recent years, especially during The Great Lockdown, I’ve been working my way through selections from those 100 Best Movies of All Time lists. This 1979 movie by acclaimed Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky was one, I’ll admit, I was a little wary of. Critics hail it as a masterpiece, but also mention its obscurity of meaning as if it was a philosophical tract rather than a film.
Tarkovsky had impressed me before with his less-is-more 1972 science fiction film Solaris, but this one I thought would be much more difficult to follow. I was instead surprised to find a story of much greater clarity and depth, yet one that allowed a huge amount of possible interpretation – the best of all worlds.
As a child growing up in Manchester, England, I would descend into an abandoned railway cutting bordering my street, where trees and wildlife were reclaiming an old station and tunnels were filled with ponds and reeds. This movie follows a trio who explore an abandoned, overgrown, forbidden zone with many of the same rules – step here, not there – that I remember from childhood games. The fact that the potential dangers are never seen in the movie, and no one ever suffers from them, made me wonder if the whole scenario was indeed invented – were the dangers ever real? It’s certainly one interpretation.
It feels wrong to try and summarize the plot of such a visual feast of a movie, but in short – the trio enter this forbidden zone where these apparent dangers are navigated, so that they can enter a room where, it is believed, their deepest wish will be granted. The zone, despite being treated as a place of ever-shifting rules and terrors, appears tranquil, beautiful, and much nicer than the outside world the trio arrived from. Such inversions made me wonder what this movie might really be telling me.
The trio of interacting characters – in some ways representing art, science, and wish-fulfilment, but mostly just fascinating people – respond to each other dramatically and unpredictably. Like so many movies labeled (or mislabeled) as science fiction, the setting is a place for human wants, needs, and predicaments to be explored more fully than “our” world allows. For a movie made in the Soviet Union, there is a surprising amount of underlying feeling of the meaning of faith, and the loss of it. Without faith in something – even if it is our own abilities to make others happy – what are we? This is a subject I have found myself pondering this month, for personal reasons, and so its exploration here for me is deeply fascinating.
It’s perfectly cast, lovingly shot, with a remarkable use of color, and absence of color, of sound, and of silence, and peace. It’s one of the most remarkable movies I have ever seen in its use of subtle tensions. I have never seen the shapes of heads so artistically explored in moving images.
What is my main takeaway from this masterpiece? Simple. Standing on the threshold of having all your dreams realized is, it turns out, in many ways much more powerful than getting everything you desire.