Stalker (1979) Tarkovsky’s Infamous & Unfettered Artistic Vision (Review)

Solaris got the remake, Andrei Rublev got the Vatican’s thumbs-up, and Mirror famously caused Lars von Trier to declare Andrei Tarkovsky was God.  But the biggest cultural footprint of all the Russian director’s seven feature films undoubtedly belongs to Stalker.  His adaptation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic has inspired a book by Geoff Dyer, a central metaphor in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, an affectionate joke in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak, and a hit series of video games.  After the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, the depopulated area was referred to officially as the Zone of Alienation, recalling the Zone the three travellers in Stalker are trying to get through.  The deserted industrial landscapes of modern Chernobyl do resemble the ones in Tarkovsky’s film, and the officials charged with maintaining the ruined plant even came to refer to themselves as “stalkers”.  It was as though history itself had joined in the tributes to Tarkovsky’s work.

Like Aleksey German’s recent Strugatsky brothers adaptation Hard to be a God, Tarkovsky takes the engine of the novel he’s adapting and builds a disturbingly immersive sensory experience around it.  Alexander Kaidanovsky, his face like a clenched fist, plays the “stalker”, a mysterious guide employed to take people into the Room, a location within the Zone.  An opening text explains that the Zone is part of a “small country” (the film was shot in Estonia) where a meteorite had landed.  Somehow the meteorite’s impact had the power to suspend the laws of reality within the Zone, part of which involves granting the Room the power to grant your innermost wishes.

The film is slow, pared-back and deeply enigmatic, admitting many possible readings of this simple central storyline.  The most obvious would be that it is another of Tarkovsky’s explorations of morality.  We first see the Stalker defying his wife as she begs him not to return to the Zone, and his journeys do seem to involve a lot of risk and no reward.  Ever since his debut Ivan’s Childhood, Tarkovsky had been drawn to self-sacrificing characters – his most cherished unmade project was an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, whose central character Prince Myshkin is surely Russian culture’s greatest Christ analogue.

Clearly, we are meant to contrast the Stalker’s altruism with the more self-involved morality of his two clients, identified only as The Writer and The Professor.  The latter initially keeps his reasons for wanting to be in the Room a secret, but the Writer is worried about his flagging career.  He thinks that a scientific analysis of the Zone might earn him a Nobel prize, if not through his work then through the Room’s wish-granting powers.  As they head further into the crash site they theorise further about the nature of the Room, and they must face up to the chilling possibility that it gives you what you genuinely want, rather than what you say you want.  The Stalker can survive this because he is completely selfless; he has no hidden desires for the Room to exploit.  For the Writer and the Professor, whose psyches are more layered and fallible, this becomes a substantial threat.

In his book Zona, about Stalker, Geoff Dyer quotes Jung with relation to this plot development; “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls”.  The treatment of women and men in the film made me think of Jung’s theory of the anima, the idea that men have a feminine self within their psyche which they have to connect with in order to develop fully.  The Stalker removes this part of him entirely when he abandons his wife to return to the Zone at the start, and Alisa Freindlich plays this confrontation in a big, anguished way which is completely at odds with the acting styles of all the male performers in this film.  Clearly, she is different from him in a lot of ways, yet Tarkovsky’s adaptation gives her a chance to explain what she gets from her husband’s dangerous life.  It’s not in the Strugatsky’s novel, and it reveals her to be more similar to her husband than we’d previously suspected.  Then a cryptic final scene reveals another secret of Stalker’s women, a metaphysical provocation that is unlikely to be read the same way by any two individual viewers.

Tarkovsky creates a neat visual metaphor for the couple’s distance; towards the start, they talk to each other in profile, one in front of the other, one facing left and one facing right.  Once the Stalker leaves his home the film’s key visual motif is a figure walking away from the camera into the fog, towards the mysteries of the Zone.  In a way, the strangest cultural tie-in to Stalker is the video games, and not simply because most movie-to-game adaptations work with blockbusters rather than abstruse Soviet art films.  Stalker is a strange choice for a game adaptation because it is indifferent to the two visual devices that games have taken from cinema; the POV shot and the sideways movement.  So many different pieces of media from classic Westerns to side-scrolling platform games have shown characters moving from left to right as a shorthand for progress and forward momentum, yet there’s almost none of this in Stalker.  The movement is almost exclusively along the Z-axis, away from the camera, the characters sinking into the landscape rather than travelling across it.

There are legitimate problems somebody could have with Stalker.  The opening extended flashback is shot in a black-and-orange colour scheme that Lars von Trier borrowed for The Element of Crime; it’s so determinedly charmless that it feels like Tarkovsky is actually trying to see how ugly he can make his colour palette before it occludes his compositional skill.  (It didn’t get that bad for this viewer, but it felt like he was trying)  Brevity was never among Tarkovsky’s considerable range of talents, and it’s worth questioning whether the 155-minute run-time of Stalker is strictly necessary.

These questions will be determined by personal taste; the one objective fact is that everything in this film is a deliberate choice by Tarkovsky.  Famously, the shoot was protracted enough to make Apocalypse Now look like a – well, like a roadside picnic, funnily enough, with Tarkovsky repeatedly junking and reshooting scenes that failed to match up to his technical demands.  What we’re left with is an accomplished film that will divide audiences because it represents its director’s vision unfiltered and uncompromised in a way that makes you appreciate how very rare a sight that is.

Thanks for reading our review of Stalker

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