Twenty years ago, a meteorite
fell to Earth, and decimated a provincial Russian town. Villagers
travelled through this curious area, now known as The Zone, and
disappeared. Stories purport that there is an inner chamber within The Zone called
The Room that grants one's deepest wish.
Fearing the consequences from such an inscrutable resource, the army
immediately secured the area with barbed wire and armed patrol. But the
desperate and the suffering continue to make the treacherous journey,
led by a disciplined, experienced stalker who can stealthily navigate
through the constantly changing traps and pitfalls of The Zone. A
successful Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn), perhaps searching for
inspiration or adventure, and a Scientist (Nikolai Grinko) searching for
Truth, enlist the Stalker (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky) to guide them
through The Zone. The Stalker has been trained by a renowned
stalker named Porcupine, who, after an excursion with his brother into The Zone, returned alone and infinitely wealthy, only to commit
suicide a week later. Soon, it is evident that reaching The Zone
is not their greatest impediment, but the uncertainty over their deepest
wish. As the men approach the threshold to The Room, their fear
and trepidation for the materialization of their answered prayers leads
to profound revelation and self-discovery.
Stalker is a visually serene, highly metaphoric,
and deeply haunting treatise on the essence of the soul. Episodically,
Andrei Tarkovsky uses chromatic shifts to delineate between the outside
world and The Zone. Thematically, as in Solaris,
the transition serves as an oneiric device to separate physical reality
from the subconscious. The created barriers and imposed laws of the
outside world parallel the Stalker's incoherent tracking methods for
reaching The Room. Note that despite the Stalker's warning not to
use the same path twice, the Scientist returns to retrieve his knapsack
unharmed, casting doubt on the Stalker's navigational rules.
Symbolically, it is as if the subconscious is in denial of its sincerest
wish, creating its own boundaries and impediments to prevent its
realization. After a circuitous route, the men arrive at the antechamber
to The Room, hesitant to proceed, unable to define their
innermost wish: their spiritual longing. The floor is strewn with coins,
hypodermic needles, weapons, and religious icons: a reflection of the
mind's search for escape from its misery. In the end, The Zone's
real or imagined powers proves to be inconsequential to the weary,
ambivalent seekers. It was all in the journey.
From STRICTLY
FILM SCHOOL
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