Stalker (1979)

STALKER  (1979)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Andrei Tarkovsky
    Alexander Kaidanovsky, Nikolai Grinko,
    Anatoly Solonitsin, Alice Friendlich
Somewhere in an unnamed country, there's a place called "the Zone". Armed guards patrol its perimeter, allowing nobody in. The guards themselves are afraid to go in there. Inside the Zone, there's said to be a room where, if you can find it, your innermost wish becomes reality. Three men break through the guarded border and enter the Zone. One's a writer. Another's a professor. The third's a "stalker", a kind of underground tour guide who gets paid to escort travelers surreptitiously into, through and out of the Zone. A demanding, ambiguous, sci-fi puzzle, long on talk and short on action, a slog to sit through but great to look at. The scenes outside the Zone are in sepia. Everything in them looks grimy and wet, a primitive industrial landscape in an advanced state of decay. The Zone doesn't look much more inviting, but at least it's in color, and the difference is startling. Some puzzles aren't meant to be solved, and this might be one of them, but if you enjoyed trying to wrap your head around Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life", or Lars von Trier's "Melancholia", or Tarkovsky's "Solaris", you might like "Stalker", too. Geoff Dyer's "Zona", published in 2012, is a book-length meditation on this film.