Sometimes it's tough to love the classics.
So it is for me with Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker.
It's like watching a beautiful painting dry.
I can marvel at the cinematography and production design, and try to get my head around the philosophical complexities on offer, but it leaves me cold.
The film is set in an unnamed country in the near future, where a mysterious Zone exists….
… Was it created by a meteor? An alien invasion? No one knows.
Rumour has it that inside this strange territory lies a room that will grant your innermost wish.
Our faith-based Stalker – who's part priest, part tour guide - leads two materialists, an empirical Professor and a cynical Writer, into The Zone.
As they traverse polluted rivers and filthy tunnels, the men engage in existential debate.
Stalker reveals that the Zone is anti-intuitive: safe places are the most dangerous, weakness is the true strength.
There is no straight way forward and there's no retreating.
Fittingly, in this topsy turvy world, Stalker leads from behind.
As a philosophical meditation Stalker is often compelling.
The photography is beautiful, with Tarkovsky using long static shots, depth of field and the particularly unnerving technique of characters appearing in the foreground suddenly.
You could call it sci-fi of the soul.
But the pace makes glaciers seem dynamic.
Tarkovsky called his style “sculpting in time” and he certainly is able to squeeze 30 minutes' worth of plot into 160 minutes and make it feel like a mere five hours.
Meanwhile, his characters are remote, merely mouthpieces for his dialectics.It's almost like a Michael Bay film in negative – slow and thoughtful with no special effects, this is the anti-Transformers – and just as flawed.
The DVD comes with a raft of Extras including interviews with surviving crew members and a fragment of Tarkovsky's student film “The Steamroller and the Violin”.
What the DVD really needs though is a commentary to help guide us through Tarkovsky's ideas and techniques.
Stalker may be one to revisit in the future but for now I'm giving it three stars. Stalker is in stores now.
