Somewhere over the Rainbow?: Stalker (1979) by Andrey Tarkovsky
Stalker isn’t a typical arthouse film. Of all the arthouse films I’ve watched, Stalker has struck out to me as being the most ambitious and visionary of them all – because of it’s unique wielding of filmic syntax, music and elaborate mise-en-scene construction to evoke the dry, bleak wasteland that serves as the backdrop for this visual odyssey like no other. Geoff Dyer, a film critic, said of the film: “…it’s not enough to say that Stalker is a great film – it is the reason cinema was invented.
Breathtaking. Critics often throw about the word like it means nothing – just a mere synonym for awe, and wonder. I mean, not a lot of films take your breath away. They may dazzle you – but not so much as to take your breath away; never are they able to steal your air supply even for a few microseconds of intense wonderment – perhaps a nano, yes.
But I’ll the use the word placed in its literal and not figurative sense here.
It truly is breathtaking.
I recall my experience watching the opening shot – as the bedroom doors slowly open and the camera inches in at snail-pace; the feeling of eerie wonder coupled with the dead, tonal silence that we dread so bad and a sepia tone of film that evokes this dry and morbid world constructed out of longing and frustration – the very essence of wanting to enter that room and feel every bit of it and understand what lies within it parallels the frustrations the characters have in search of an innermost happiness that they can’t attain; and so elaborate is this opening bedroom shot is that we have seen the entire film within the first five minutes of the film – the rest is just walking into that room at an even slower pace. And yes, it’s quite a slow film.
But it’s good that the film is slow; fast films fail in atmosphere and instead shoot for organic character development – which sometimes can also be brashly missed (unless you’re Martin Scorsese). Tarkovsky knows this, and has slowed the film down – giving us time to absorb this surreal universe; a dream-scape of nightmarish kaleidoscopes examining truth, lies, fear and darkness that lie innermost within us illustrated mostly by the intricately constructed sets that highlight a hyper-real world of decadence and post-apocalypse that stun and draw us in at every moment.
Once the rather bleak and morosely set story spins together – we see even more movie magic. As the trolley takes them to The Zone, all of a sudden color kicks into the film – providing the world with a heightened sense of reality and wonderment. Suddenly The Zone evokes a world that of Wizard of Oz (Remember after the tornado? The colour change from the bleak world to the zone follows that of Dorothy’s hometown to Land of Oz) where there is a parallel search for one’s wishes to be fulfilled – all of his regrets and needs taken care of by the mystical “room” – which akin to Oz, ends up as fraud. What is more tantalizingly similar between the Wizard of Oz and Stalker is the presence of the dog. Is it supposed to be evocative or reminiscent of Toto? Furthermore, how does the Stalker get to the Room? By using the nuts wrapped in bandages as a dutiful guide, reminiscent of the yellow brick road. In addition, similar to the Tin-man and Straw-man in the Wizard of Oz, Stalker sees the journey of a writer and physicist who are complete opposite in their views of each other – which is reminiscent of the binary opposite between the tin-man’s lack of heart and the straw-man’s lack of brains. This parallel between Oz and The Zone is also fascinating in that at the end of the film, similar to Wizard of Oz, we get a sensing that this magical trip was merely a dream.
What is Tarkovsky really trying to say? No one can say for sure. My take is this; Tarkovsky is dissecting the human desire for redemption, forgival and rejuvenation – a mystic “Room” to comfort us and assure us that we were not useless – that we served a purpose and that we are alive and let others live. But there is no such room – or perhaps the feeding of our true desires is not comforting – but even more terrifying than we’d imagine.
Linking back to the beginning shot of the bedroom – is Tarkovsky trying to say something about the room? Is he showing us the room of our innermost desires? Where our children sleep by us with our spouse – where we are at peace and tranquil – where trains and noise do not shake a world of warm comfort? Is he trying to also evoke the lesson Dorothy learns at the end of Wizard of Oz about the need to care for someone? (There are so many parallels it’s preposterous! Take for instance, when the stalker is lying down on the floor and complaining in irritance about what happened, and the wife telling him to relax and comfort him to believing it’s all okay, similar to how Dorothy’s mother calms Dorothy down after the exhilarating dream – what a sinister parallel!)
I am convinced that Stalker is Tarkovsky’s bleak, grimy and hyper-realistic take on the Wizard of Oz – through which he explains the human psyche – and how we don’t really know what our innermost feelings are, and that we’d really rather not to. Remember Porcupine?
Score for this film: 100/100
Tharun Suresh's Cinema Verite 