Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Hardness and strength are death's companions. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. "When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. Tarkovsky gives us the Buddhist concept that those that are soft and flexible will survive, whereas that which is hard and strong is close to breaking, and dying. This journey to Oz is not along a yellow brick road, but through a nuclear hellscape.Īnd yet, there is hope, and a message of perseverance. The trio never enter The Room, but do you really believe it exists? A room where all one's wishes come true, while living under a soul-crushing totalitarian regime? It's a pipe dream. One needn't look to extraterrestrials to have created such a place. In my view, The Zone and the journey to get to it simply represents life in the USSR - a wasteland in the literal and symbolic sense, one with hidden dangers everywhere, and whose rules defy logic, and may change in an instant. The scene where the stalker walks with her through a stark, desolated landscape, with their legless daughter on his shoulders, nuclear reactors in the background, and music playing that's reminiscent of Pink Floyd, is very powerful, and stuck with me. There are few actors, but each turns in a soulful performance, including the three leads but also the stalker's wife (Alisa Freyndlikh) - check out her late scene speaking to the camera, and while emotional, getting around to lighting a cigarette. Meanwhile, the stalker is severely disillusioned by the cynicism and impotence of these intellectuals. He wants to destroy the Room, recognizing that it will eventually lead to disaster in the form of absolute power granted to some lunatic, and how true this is. The physicist, on the other hand, fears being denounced by a fellow scientist, accused of disloyalty to the Party for personal reasons, which was a very real problem under Stalin. But if no one is going to read me in one hundred years, why the hell should I write at all?" He also describes being put through the wringer, at first thinking he will change the world with his words, and then finding out that the world has changed him, and will soon forget him, channeling the angst of Russian authors from Dostoevsky to Grossman. Furthermore, "It's impossible to write, thinking all the time of success or failure. The writer observes that to be effective, he must be tormented and unsure of himself, that is, the moment he thinks he's a genius and has it made, he's no longer a great writer. The dialogue is fantastic throughout the movie, and clearly shows the struggle of the intelligentsia in this 'brave new world' of Communism. I found that the pace and visuals of devastation to be meaningful, underscoring the bleakness of their lives, and allowing for the quiet of deeper thought. The film is Kafkaesque, and it's also slow and ponderous, too much so for some viewers. In this the film seems to deviate, and in more explicitly dark, introspective ways, from the original novel by the Strugatsky brothers (who as an aside, wrote some fantastic fiction aside from 'Roadside Picnic' - check out 'The Doomed City', 'Definitely Maybe', and 'The Dead Mountaineer's Inn' among others). The film is highly allegorical though, and while the trio face murky subterranean horrors, they don't seem to be of the alien kind, but within the mind instead, those associated with the existential condition, and living in a modern world under a totalitarian regime. The Zone is said to hold mortal dangers to those within it, and is also reactive to their presence, shifting in unpredictable ways. In it, a guide (a 'stalker', Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy) leads a writer (Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy) and a physics professor (Nikolai Grinko) through a mysterious area of devastation known as 'The Zone', in search of 'The Room', which holds the promise of making their deepest desires come true. A movie of uncommon depth, 'Stalker' is poetic, philosophical, and brooding - and certainly not standard science fiction fare.
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