Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1980)

**SPOILERS**

Stalker can be best described as a science-fiction film structured as a metaphysical journey -and arguably just that, a meta- rather than physical journey- for three men in search of inner truth and self-worth. Their search takes them from a drab, post-industrial city to a restricted area outside the city limits called the Zone, where it is believed aliens once visited. The Zone is a minefield of perceptual illusions, booby traps, and shifting geography, making each step a potentially life-threatening danger. The Zone has been officially recognized as a forbidden area by the government ever since an investigative group went missing (eerily foreshadowing Chernobyl, where the chemical spill area was also referred to as 'the Zone'). Legend has it, however, that nestled within the danger-ridden Zone is a room where one's deep inner wishes are granted. The latter plot point is crucial, because the room sees through superficiality and grants not what you may think you desire, but the desires of your soul. The Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) is someone trained as a guide for people willing to risk their life to reach this wish fulfilling room. His latest 'clients' are a Writer (Tarkovsky favorite Anatoly Solonitsyn) and a Scientist (Nikolai Grinko). For these weary travelers, stripped of their self-confidence, faith and ability to love, the room represents, perhaps, their final hope.

After weathering the death traps along their path (rendered through mood and anticipation rather than cinematic, science-fiction pyrotechnics), the men arrive at the threshold of the room (symbolically enough, the gutted remains of a church). We learn that the Scientist, fearing that the wishing room may be misused for evil intention, had planned all along to destroy the room with a bomb he smuggled into the Zone in his knapsack The Stalker makes a frantic plea to let the room exist, as it represents for many the last depository of faith. Shaken and crying, the Stalker is reduced to a pathetic state (what else would you expect from a Tarkovsky 'hero'?). Somehow the Stalker's desparate pleas move the Scientist, and he dismantles the bomb. Exhausted, the three men sit quietly outside the room, with neither the energy to continue their philosophical spattings, or the courage to venture into the room and test their inner selves. As if to reflect their sorrowful epiphany, a gorgeous sunshower spontaneously falls into the water-filled room.

The three men return to their urban wasteland as they left, seemingly bereft of spirit or hope. The three men sit still and quiet in the café where they met at the beginning of the film. In fact, outside of the black dog that identifies the Zone, it could appear as if they never even left the bar. The Stalker's wife (Alyssa Freindlikh), along with their crippled, mutant daughter 'Monkey' (Natasha Abramova), comes to collect her husband at the café. Upon returning to their squalid home, the Stalker burdens his wife with his growing despair in the face of the cynical travellers. If people become so cynical to the point of losing all vestige of hope, what will come of him? The film concludes with the Stalker's mute daughter performing what appears to be a magical feat of telekinesis by willing a group of glasses to move across the kitchen table.

The three men travel to the Zone by way of a stolen flatcar that they drive along a train track. This visual transition from b/w to color is further underscored aurally by the mesmeric soundtrack during the flatcar journey (clanking of the steel wheels on the tracks, and an oscillating electronic pitch) which places us in a somnolent state (much like the travelers) that makes the change that much sharper to the full sensorial system. Where this DVD is most welcome is in the darkly lit, low-key scenes, namely the scenes in the bar and in the Stalker's bunker-like apartment, where we can now make out so much more detail of the film's painstaking production design. The cut from the Writer in the bar (in b/w) to the color shot of the Stalker's daughter Monkey in color, is even more striking than the initial transition to color when they enter the Zone. Her gold head scarf stands out dramatically, as it should, since the shift to color now assumes important thematic significance -the power, magic, 'color' of the Zone- now emerges in the drab cityscape. In fact, in the VHS version the scene in the bar is more sepia than b/w, and to be precise, it is only the daughter who 'lives' in color in these post-Zone city scenes, rendering her a specific magical quotient in the film's philosophical system, which is in keeping with Tarkovsky's ideas on the purity of children and their ability to intuit reality over and above the culturally/socially conditioned adult. So while the scenes between the whimpering, self-loathing Stalker and his wife are in b/w, the final 'telekinetic' scene with the table top glasses, passing train, and daughter is in full color.

Food for thought: A Metaphor for Faith?

Rating: 5 stars

No Trailer, but check this!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBBR8Pn7eUQ&feature=related