Zona (15 page)

⁴³
A view occasionally endorsed by Tarkovsky, in a 1981 interview, for example: ‘I completely agree with the suggestion that it was Stalker who had created the Zone’s world in order to invent some sort of faith, a faith in that world’s existence.’ And again, in 1986: ‘The Zone doesn’t exist. It’s Stalker himself who invented his Zone.’

⁴⁴
This would certainly seem to be the lesson of
The Return
and
The Banishment
by Andrei Zvyagintsev.
The Return
(2003) starts spectacularly with a group of boys jumping from a high watchtower into deep water. Ivan, the youngest of a pair of brothers, is scared of making the jump so his brother, Andrei, and the others leave him up there, shivering and ashamed. The next day they learn from their mother that their father has returned after an absence of twelve years. Played by Konstanin Lavronenko (who looks like Russia’s answer to George Clooney
and
José Mourinho), he’s evidently some kind of gangster. The three of them, father and two sons, go on a road trip but it’s more like a pirated Russian offshoot of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme than a vacation. The father is a stern taskmaster; he has the unyielding harshness of a man who has done time and learned how to survive in the brutal world of the Russian prison system. He bullies and scares them and it all starts to seem like a test of the boys’ manly mettle. The buried loot or hidden treasure or whatever it is the father is trying to retrieve leads, after numerous setbacks, tests and diversions to a remote island—the father makes the boys row there after the boat’s engine gives out—dominated by another rickety old watchtower. Vanya climbs the tower, the hated father climbs after him, falls and dies. As a result of the skills the father has taught them in the course of their trip the boys are able to travel back home, without the father’s body, which sinks with the boat on the crossing back from the island.

The Return
cries out to be interpreted as a return to— and extension of—the Zone, to the kind of cinematic space or vision discovered by Tarkovsky. (Even the walls of the abandoned building where the boys play and fight in the opening scenes seem Zonal; on the island there is a verdant meadow, in the middle of which stands an abandoned hut.) Tarkovsky bequeathed his progeny a sense of the visionary potential of film, of space. But he is a hard and gruelling taskmaster. If you want to follow his example you have also to kill him off. Once that has occurred you can make your own way into new, uncharted cinematic wilderness. I apologize for this explanation—one part Harold Bloom and one part ill-digested psychoanalysis— but you take the point.

The problem—though this becomes fully evident only with Zvyagintsev’s next film—is that he has
not
killed off the father, has not shaken off the huge and inhibiting debt to the master. Or perhaps, having killed him off in
The Return,
Zvyagintsev devotes the whole of
The Banishment
(2007) to atoning for this crime. Three of the first half dozen shots evoke, in turn,
Nostalghia
(car driving through landscape, curving out of and then back into shot),
Stalker
(bleak industrial zone, freight train) and
Solaris
(car hurtling into urban abyss). Thereafter it’s impossible not to succumb to spotting Tarkovsky allusions and references: kids leafing through books, or gazing at an orange fire (albeit in a hearth); Bach; Leonardo (in the form of a jigsaw puzzle of
The Annunciation
being completed by children). So overt is the Tarkovsky bequest that, at one point, when the wife and mother, Vera, takes a sip of her drink and puts the glass on the table one half expects her to start moving it telekinetically. She is pregnant but the child is not her husband’s (Lavronenko again, back from the dead or, if you prefer, returned from
The Return);
it—i.e., the film—is Tarkovsky’s. The house where all this occurs is located in a barren and beautiful landscape that, like the altogether more fecund setting of
Mirror,
is replete with childhood memories. ‘Why isn’t the creek flowing?’ asks Kir, the little boy, of his father, Lavronenko.
Because,
I found myself silently responding,
Uncle Andrei has used it all up.
‘Did you see it [
i.e., Uncle Andrei’s
] flow
[of images]
?’ asks Kir again. ‘I saw nothing else,’ says Lavronenko, taking the words out of my mouth. By the end, needless to say, the rains replenish the creek, which starts to flow, turning it into a Zoney stream, complete with everyday detritus hallowed by the fact of being filmed. There is more to
The Banishment
than its Tarkovsky infatuation. Doubtless, I am guilty of the crime of which I am accusing Zvyagintsev: being so absorbed by
Stalker
that I can see nothing but Tarkovsky, so steeped in his view of the world that I mistake it for the world itself. Certainly Tarkovsky is not the only director whose work is, as they say, cited or sighted but he is the dominant force and I can think of no other film so dominated—to the point almost of self-immolation—by the work of another director.

The end
of The Banishment
echoes the beginning with a shot of an almond tree and a car winding its way along the road that runs beside it. Except this is not quite the same as the beginning, for the camera then tracks to the side to some peasant women—who seem to have stepped out of a Brueghel painting (which carries with it the tacit suggestion that they have also stepped out of a Tarkovsky film, at one remove). Suddenly we’re in a different film. It’s as if, playing alongside the movie we’ve just seen, was another, which we now have the option of watching.

This artful if rather distracting sideways shift into another movie alerted me to something that I had, as it were, known but not realized about Tarkovsky. Like all the greatest filmmakers he immerses you so completely in his world that it never occurs to you—unless it is by design, à la Godard at the end of
Le Mépris
(a deliberate limiting that serves also as a deeper immersion)—that the world on-screen ceases to exist at the edges of screen. The best directors all invert Coriolanus’s claim that there is a world elsewhere. No, the world beyond the screen is just a continuation of the world we are seeing. To either side and behind there is more of the same. We are not even in a cinema; we are in a world. Or, rather, there is nothing but cinema; there is only the Zone.

⁴⁵
If she’d asked me I’d have said yes in an instant. I’d love to have a dog. Or would I? The fact that my wife and I have not got a dog despite thinking about getting a dog, mulling it over and talking about nothing else for five years, suggests that maybe we don’t want a dog. In some way, though,
this
dog—a dog that looks more like a concentrated idea of dog than any particular breed of dog—is there to remind me that I do want a dog, that it’s not for nothing that we spend all our time talking about getting a dog and looking at dog websites and that we already have a name for the dog that we’ve not got around to getting: Monkey, named after Stalker’s daughter, even though this is a potentially confusing name for a dog, just as Cat or Fish would be. But then—this is why we go round in circles the whole time—we also know that the reason we have not got a dog yet is because there is only one dog we want, Dotty, our friends’ lurcher. That would be my deepest wish: for our friends suddenly to say, ‘You’ve been such good friends to us over the years that we’ve decided to give you Dotty, even though a lurcher needs lots of open space and you don’t even have a garden and she will miss us and the Kent countryside so badly that she’ll probably just pine away and die in a fortnight.’

⁴⁶
Looking back on the sequence when Stalker is lying in water and the dog comes up to him, director of photography Knyazhinsky remarks fondly that this ‘fantastic dog’, who only understood commands in Estonian, ‘literally worked miracles’: a real Zone dog!

⁴⁷
In a sense Stalker’s book collection is also Tarkovsky’s: ‘Only that which I would like to have in my home has the right to find itself in a shot of one of my films,’ he said in an interview. ‘If the objects are not to my liking, I simply cannot allow myself to leave them in the film.’ (Bresson puts the emphasis on the things themselves: ‘Make the objects look as if they want to be there.’)

⁴⁸
It’s also further evidence of what Tarkovsky said about only using things in his films that he would have in his own house: the same cuckoo clock puts in an audio appearance in
Mirror
when the children run out of the house to see the fire.

⁴⁹
A lovely offer, reminiscent of the one my mum once made on behalf of my dad. Owing to an unlucky turn of events at school I seemed, in the sixth form, to have no friends. I had no one to go to the pub with and my mum said that my dad would go out for a drink with me, an idea I knew would not appeal to him as it would have involved spending money, which he hated, and going to the pub, which he never liked.

⁵⁰
That Tarkovsky intended something like this—Stalker and his wife as stand-ins for his own sense of persecuted devotion—seems especially likely given that he wanted Larissa to play the part but was dissuaded by Rerberg and co., who lobbied successfully for Alisa Freindlikh. Her tocamera monologue was originally intended to go at the beginning; only late in the process of shooting the third version did Tarkovsky decide to put it here, as a kind of epilogue.

While Tarkovsky may have seen himself as a Stalker—a persecuted martyr taking us on voyages into a Zone where ultimate truths are revealed—he also became identified with the destination itself. There is a poignant moment in an interview with the terminally ill production designer Rashit Safiullin, who, when asked about the Zone, recalls the time he spent living, working and talking with Tarkovsky: ‘Here you live being your inmost self…it’s somewhere where you can talk with somebody, something unfathomable.’ The interviewer asks him to clarify. Does he mean…? ‘Yes, speaking with god. When Andrei was no more I was bereaved of a person with whom I could talk about the most important things. That room vanished.’ ‘So he was the Room to you?’ asks the interviewer. ‘Yes.’

⁵¹
Bjork got the lyrics to her song ‘The Dull Flame of Desire’—on the album
Volta
—from the English translation of this poem, acknowledging
Stalker
as the source.

⁵²
Extraordinary, the way that this film continues to creep into my life in the most unexpected ways. In the last several years I’ve taken to listening to ambient music— William Basinski, Stars of the Lid, that kind of stuff— while working (the drone, the lack of beat, is an aid to concentration). I’d listened to the Lids’ album
The Tired Sounds
Of dozens of times and had always liked the funny moment, on ‘Requiem for Dying Mothers, part 2’, when a dog starts whining (just as I’d liked the dog barking on one of the recordings of Dylan’s ‘Every Grain of Sand’). I assumed a dog had somehow strayed into the studio and the Lids had decided to retain the intrusion as a random bit of canine backing vocals. Then, listening to it as I was writing about this scene, I realized the sound of the dog whimpering was preceded by a slight scraping noise. I listened to it again. And again. There could be no doubt, there was nothing accidental about it: the Lids had
sampled
the sound of the dog whining in response to the glass moving along the table!

⁵³
Apparently Tarkovsky personally dragged it with a piece of discreetly painted string.

⁵⁴
Sound recordist Vladimir Sharun gives a full account of how the film came to end like this: ‘Thanks to Tarkovsky’s passion for anything out of the ordinary a man called Eduard Naumov somehow ended up within our circle…Once Naumov showed us one of his films. The film showed Ninel Sergeyevna Kulagina [who] discovered she had an ability for telekinesis—she moved objects with her sight. On the screen Kulagina, surrounded by a group of people looking like scientists, was sitting behind a table with a transparent top—to avoid any claims of forgery. On the table there was a lighter, a spoon, some other items. Kulagina’s face darkened with exertion, she fixed her unblinking stare on the lighter which followed her gaze. Tarkovsky attentively watched Naumov’s film and after it was finished he immediately exclaimed: “Well, what do you say, here is the ending for
Stalker
!”’