1979: STALKER

What’s it about?

A recently released ex-con, a writer, and a scientist meet in a grimy, run-down town planning to penetrate a forbidden area nearby called “the Zone”. This Zone is purportedly an area of great danger that was cordoned off after a meteor impact. Inside, there supposedly exists a room that has the power to grant the innermost wish of anyone who visits it, but the dangers of the Zone are so great that it is virtually impossible to reach except with the guidance of a “stalker”.

The ex-convict is just such a stalker -- and, in fact, he has seemingly been in prison for violating the cordon around the Zone. He leads the other two past the police patrols and into the Zone, which appears to be a decaying wasteland full of human detritus overgrown with plants and mired in vast bogs. Once inside, the stalker emphasizes the arbitrary nature of the Zone, claiming it is full of shifting traps and that a single wrong step can result in death. As they approach the wish-granting room, the appearance of weapons in the possession of the men become a point of contention and threaten the continued existence of the wish-granting room.

Is it any good?

I’ve never heard a kind word about STALKER, except perhaps that it looks nice -- which is a comment that people make when they want to damn a movie with faint praise. (“What did you think of the picture?” “Oh, the cinematography was nice...”) The biggest complaint is that STALKER is boring, and it’s not especially easy to refute that charge. It was directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, after all, and his SOLYARIS (1972) is also well-known for creeping into the final frontier at a glacier’s pace.

But frankly, I can’t say that I was ever actually bored by STALKER -- at least not until the very end. I did select a slow and slightly hungover morning for my viewing since I expected a meditative pace, but I don’t think my indulgent mood was entirely responsible for the fact that I actually liked this flick a lot. But if you plan to watch it, I would still recommend going in with an expectation that you might be bored.

The beginning of the movie follows the stalker (he never has a name) as he prepares for his journey into the Zone. At this point, we know nothing about what the Zone is -- only that the stalker’s wife is on the point of despair when she discovers that he wants to return. I can’t even recall when exactly the idea of the wish-granting room is introduced. At first, the motivations of the other characters seem predictable -- the scientist seems to want to research the Zone and the writer claims he is seeking “inspiration”. But eventually it becomes clear that their real motivation is to seek help in the form of granted wishes.

The beginning of the movie is shot in high contrast black and white. I don’t usually talk about this kind of film school stuff, but the shots are also very long in duration and have very deep focus. Those three things combined give them an artificial quality, as though you’re looking at a moving miniature diorama rather than actual locations. I actually thought at first that the live-action film may have been combined with animation or miniature photography to get some of the effect, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The look of these black and white sections is so striking that it’s almost a shame when the movie switches to color when the three men enter the Zone. It's kind of a reverse of the WIZARD OF OZ (1939) effect -- the black and white sections are actually more distinctive and more visually striking than anything in the color sections.

I’m not going to try to convince anybody who thinks otherwise that STALKER is exciting, but at the very least I hope that we can all agree the beginning is pretty engrossing. The scenes of the stalker and his wife and the stalker and his two clients very naturalistically relay information about the Zone and the intentions of the characters. The three men then begin the long process of evading the patrols that are supposed to keep the curious out of the Zone. There’s not much action or violence here, but the infiltration is clearly fraught with danger and is plenty suspenseful.

It is true that we never learn very much about the characters themselves. I wouldn’t exactly say that they are archetypes since they do have their own idiosyncracies, but for the most part they are ciphers. The characters rarely talk about themselves -- instead, they talk about each other, repeating rumors or taking stabs at psychoanalyzing each others’ motives and histories. They clearly don’t like each other that much, and the two clients obviously resent the stalker’s role as their leader and the way he asks them to put themselves in harm’s way to advance their progress.

This dynamic is probably my favorite thing about the movie and is what sustained my interest during the long still sections where nothing is actually happening. At the beginning -- when the dangers are familiar things like guards and guns -- the three men seem more willing to work together to stay alive. As they progress further into the Zone, however, the lack of obvious threats allows the clients to openly question the authority of the stalker. At one point they are a mere 200 yards from the wish-granting room, but the stalker insists that they must take a long and arduous detour despite the absence of any visible threat whatsoever.

In fact, there is some suggestion that the stalker is either inventing the stories of danger himself or that he is simply following a ritual that he has been taught by others. Despite the many times when the stalker explains that they are coming to a very dangerous part of the journey, nothing sinister ever happens. Even when the clients disobey the stalker (for instance, when the professor returns for a knapsack he left behind, or when the writer pushes on ahead in a wrong direction instead of waiting for the others) they don’t appear to suffer any ill effects. The stalker simply says they were lucky, or that the Zone has allowed them to break the rules.

This is not to say that nothing out of the ordinary happens. At one point, they pass by rocks that are glowing red with some kind of energy. Likewise, they are interrupted by a ringing telephone deep within the Zone where nothing should work. And a chamber close to the wish-granting room is full of odd, unexplained hummocks of dirt. To be sure, none of these things are proof that what the stalker says is true. But they are odd enough to keep the possibility alive, and both of the clients seem to largely accept the stalker’s version of reality in the end.

I’m a big fan of movies about interpersonal dynamics of groups under stress or individuals in conflict who have no outside authority to rely on, which is probably why I enjoyed myself with this one. The conflicts that arise in STALKER all seem plausible and realistic to me -- and, in some ways, the stress of the situation is only exacerbated by the absence of visible threats. It’s no wonder the clients begin to chafe under seemingly dictatorial thumb of the stalker. And yet, if there’s nothing to fear, then what should it matter who goes first in the long creepy tunnel? Likewise, if you don't believe in the threats, then how can you justify believing in the wish granting room? If you're in the mood to meditate on questions like these, STALKER sets up a lot of them but never answers any.

In any event, I enjoyed myself watching STALKER -- though it does slow down a bit at the very end when even minor characters (like the stalker’s wife) are given a chance to explain themselves at length. The final scene -- in which the stalker’s daughter apparently moves objects with her mind -- also seems to have no bearing on the rest of the movie, except as an unequivocal demonstration that perhaps something weird did happen after all.

BONUS BLOG -- 1973: IVAN VASILIEVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE

What’s it about?

A Soviet scientist working on a time machine in his apartment gets in trouble with his local party representative when he keeps tripping the fuses in the building. While demonstrating his time machine to the official, he temporarily opens up the wall to the next apartment, where a burglar is in the middle of a raid. Immediately seeing the practical application of such a machine to the burglary industry, the thief joins the two others for a real test.

However, the real test of the time machine only results in chaos as the bumbling party official and the thief are stranded in the court of Ivan the Terrible, while the historical czar ends up in modern Moscow. The scientist must then race to fix the damaged machine to set things right before the displaced people are discovered and things get complicated. But then he wakes up and we learn it was all just a dream.



Is it any good?

This is another movie that I am not going to talk about too much specifically -- partly because it’s been a few weeks since I watched it and the details have mostly faded. But I did want to bring it up because it’s a Soviet flick, and I don’t think I’ve written about any of those yet. It’s also a Soviet comedy, which is something I don’t think I have ever seen before in my life.

I find that whenever I watch a movie from a communist country, I usually approach it with a different mindset than I do a movie from the west. I end up spending most of the running time playing “spot the propaganda” and searching for collectivist themes. But the more movies I see from Soviet bloc countries, the less I feel like that kind of thing is really as much of a defining feature of their cinema as I have been led to expect. (Led by whom? I’m not sure. Maybe it is purely my own prejudices that have made me think that way.)

This is not to say that IVAN VASILIEVICH seems subversive at all. It’s primarily a slapstick comedy, with lots of misunderstandings and switched identities and Benny Hill-style high speed chases through hallways. The characters are all very self-centered as well. Even the scientist (the ostensible protagonist) is largely a passive lump who is devoted entirely to his time machine. When his wife leaves him for a movie director at the beginning of the movie, she is offended at how philosophically he takes the news. Other characters covet expensive imported bourgeois goods from the west like tape recorders and leather jackets, and everyone disrespects and ignores the overly officious party representative.

That party official is also the one who falls most rapidly and deeply in love with the czarist world when they travel back in time -- no doubt largely because he is at first mistaken for the czar himself. Ivan the Terrible, meanwhile, actually seems fairly effective in the twentieth century as he applies his “might is right” philosophy to minor domestic situations. Of course, he shortly ends up being dragged off to an insane asylum, but he really is one of the more likeable characters in the movie.

And then, as I mentioned above, the scientist wakes up and we realize the entire movie has been a dream. His wife hasn’t left him, his time machine doesn’t work, and nobody has been stranded in the past or future. On the one hand, the it’s-all-a-dream ending is always a let down. On the other hand, the movie is so slight and goofy that there’s really no sense of loss at being robbed of a real ending. It’s an earlier Soviet version of BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989), and the enjoyment really comes more from the performances, the gags, and a couple of zany dance sequences than from the story itself.