Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.
Films like Stalker drive me nuts. I know there’s something here, something I should be divining from it. There’s unquestionably something very deep here, but I don’t know that I have the vocabulary to describe it. I know at a very deep level that Andrei Tarkovsky is saying something here, but I feel like I’m just too damn stupid to know exactly what he’s getting at.
The world of Stalker is something like our world, but in a very degraded form. Much of the initial section of the film is in a strange black-and-white that doesn’t feel like black-and-white. It’s almost a sepia, but there’s an odd sensation of color, almost as if it was filmed in color and then stripped of 95% of it. Naturally, since this is a Russian film, we’re somewhere in the Soviet Union, but not somewhere like Moscow. We’re instead in an industrial wasteland, a place that looks and feels toxic. It is here that we meet the Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky), who is leaving his wife (Alisa Freindlich) to make a trip somewhere, and she doesn’t want him to go.
