Critics reviews

‘Don't hope for flying saucers. That would be too interesting," a jaded writer tells a glamorous woman in one of many strange and beautiful scenes in Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker" (1979). There are no flying saucers in the great Russian director's haunting tale of a journey into the depths of a postapocalyptic landscape, but it offers visual splendor, as well as mysteries, portents and miracles.

It might seem rather a cliché to insist that film is a visual medium, but surely what is _not_ spoken is just as important, in the total effect of this movie, as the articulation of its earnest ethical strivings. Tarkovsky seems to have found a way of photographing the human head—animated and in repose—as it had never been photographed before. He makes it monumental: sculptural and philosophical.

The film isn't aimless. Sure, given all that hiking, the mind wanders—and wanders back. At least one devotee of the film, which is about and inspires devotion, condemns this wandering as our modern inability to concentrate. Why not our old ability to transcend?

I found the beautiful, demanding film just as moving, or maybe a little more moving, as I ever have... This time around, it was such a revelations of art at its highest aspirations (and accomplishment!) that I felt I could skip going into Venice to see the Tintorettos at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco this time around. (I ended up not skipping them, because it's just something you need to see every time. But you get the idea.)

Based on sci-fi novel The Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, it still has a relatively straightforward plot, but is dense with enigmatic philosophy over its unhurried, meditative 160 minutes. As in all Tarkovsky's work, spiritual crisis is the theme. But wry dialogue punctuates its melancholy, defying those who claim he doesn't have a sense of humour.

Tarkovsky realizes the allegorical tale with an overwhelming density of visual detail; the riot and clash of textures... form a frenzied vocabulary and lend the film the torrential inner force of Dostoyevskian rhetoric. One vast subterranean dialogue sequence, in which the three travellers wrangle over metaphysical fantasies and long-stifled grudges, could be borrowed directly from a grand existential novel.

The words in the end are just a handhold for the unsteady, something with a veneer of rationality to provide narrative comfort. The terror and pleasure of Stalker comes from the calm, penetrating stare it dares us to take, and meaning(s) it demands we construct for ourselves out of what we see.

A film that is as mesmerizing as it is elusive... Where sci-fi films tend to overstate humanity's limitless imagination of the universe, Tarkovsky reappropriates the genre's trappings to suggest the cosmos' deepest truths are in one's own mind.

Whilst the debates, confessions, and petty in-fighting of the three main characters are fascinating, it's in Tarkovsky's images where true wonder and ambiguity lie, refusing any simple reduction of the many interpretations and dimensions of the story, moving beyond the literal, and the literary, and into a realm of total cinema. It's as if Tarkovsky set himself the task of pitting his images against intellectual formulae, and, amazingly, winning.

An eerie frightening film, Stalker makes use of spectacular natural locations... The last scene of the film (which I wouldn't dream of revealing) packs such an enormous punch (visually, thematically: it is different from all that came before) that it acts as a catalyst in the viewer. It tells us something we have not yet learned. It suggests that things really ARE not what they seem, that they are far more mysterious than anyone had ever dreamed.

It may not be the most signifier-loaded film in the auteur's canon. Nonetheless, it remains a dense, complex, often-contradictory, and endlessly pliable allegory about human consciousness, the necessity for faith in an increasingly secular, rational world, and the ugly, unpleasant dreams and desires that reside in the hearts of men.

It's this relationship to the characters and to the camera that makes for dizzying, frankly confusing, physically involved, and psychically evocative viewing. Stalker compounds matters in that the journey undertaken by its characters is explicitly spiritual, but what they seek and what they find is always contradicted, ambiguous, unwieldy.