Zona (2 page)

SHE EXPANDS ON THIS NOTION
of time—she’s lost her best years, has grown old—while the man is brushing his teeth. As she does so you’re reminded again of Antonioni because the plain truth is, she’s no Monica Vitti. Frankly, the combination of nagging and permanently faded looks seems like a compelling incentive to leave. She lays a whole guilt trip on him, but the usual terms—you only think of yourself—are reversed, given a kind of Dostoyevskian twist: Even if you
don’t
think of yourself…
³

She begs him to stay but, as she does so, you can see that she knows it’s in vain, that he’s going—even though he’s not actually said where he’s going. She says he’ll end up in prison. He says that everywhere’s a prison. Good answer. But a bad sign, marriage-wise. It would seem that their relationship has reached the point where the
default mode of communication is to bicker, quarrel and contradict each other. It’s not a lot of fun, this mode, but it’s easy to get the hang of and immensely difficult to get out of once you’re in it: a prison, in fact. One assumes the man’s answer is intended metaphorically but the film often makes us wonder about when and where it is set, and what its relationship is to the world beyond the screen.
Stalker
was made in the late 1970s, not the 1930s or the 1950s when the Soviet Union was a vast prison camp, when, in prison-camp slang (as Anne Applebaum points out in
Gulag),
‘the world outside the barbed wire was not referred to as “freedom”, but as the
bolshaya zona,
the “big prison zone”, larger and less deadly than the “small zone” of the camp, but no more human—and certainly no more humane.’ By the time of
Stalker,
communism had become, in Tony Judt’s words, ‘a way of life to be endured’ (which sounds, incidentally, like an alternative translation of Koyaanisqatsi, the Hopi Indian word meaning—as anyone who has ever enjoyed a couple of bong hits already knows—‘way of life needing change’ or ‘life out of balance’).
Stalker
is not a film
about
the Gulag, but the absent and unmentioned Gulag is constantly suggested, either by Stalker’s zek haircut, or by the overlapping vocabulary. As we will discover, the most perilous
part of the Zone
(zona)
is the so-called ‘meat grinder’, another prisoners’ term for the procedures of ‘the Soviet repressive system itself.’
⁴

After Stalker leaves, his wife has one of those sexualized fits (nipples prominently erect) of which Tarkovsky seems to have been fond, writhing away on the hard floor in a climax of abandonment.
⁵

He, on the other hand, like many men before and since, is on his way to the pub, making his way through railway sidings, beautifully desolate and puddly, in the postindustrial fog.
⁶

As the man makes his way across the tracks, a voiceover says everything’s ‘hopelessly boring’—a remark that makes one wonder how quickly a film
can
become boring. Which film holds the record in that particular regard? And wouldn’t that film automatically qualify as exciting and
fast-moving
if it had been able to enfold the viewer so rapidly in the itchy blanket of tedium? (Or
perhaps one of the novelties of our era is the possibility of instant boredom—like instant coffee—as opposed to a feeling that has to unfold gradually, suffocatingly, over time.) The overheard voice generates some very basic confusion: whose words are they? Presumably they are the vocalized thoughts of the person—Stalker—on-screen, tramping across the railroad tracks in the foggy fog, hands in pockets, looking pretty down in the mouth.

Especially when he sees—and it is revealed—that the person doing the talking, having the overheard thoughts, is another man, with a woman in a cute little fur cape. Uh-oh! The talker is still going on about how insufferably boring everything is. She asks him about the Bermuda Triangle. He goes on some more about how boring everything is, reckons that maybe even the Zone is boring, that it might have been more interesting to have lived in the Middle Ages. What does he mean by this? Is he saying, effectively, that he’d rather have been in
Andrei Rublev
than
Stalker?
Which wouldn’t make sense, because he’s Tarkovsky’s favourite actor, Anatoli Solonitsyn—and thirteen years earlier he
was
Andrei Rublev in
Andrei Rublev
! She, on the other hand, looks like a refugee from the Antonioni set. Not only is she
wearing the fur number and a long dress, they’re standing by a convertible—with the soft roof up—and she’s drinking out of a long clear glass, as if they’ve just emerged from the place where an orgy seems in the offing but never quite happens in
Red Desert.
They are at a port of some kind (ditto
Red Desert).
There’s a ship in the background, and rigging, derricks.

It is obvious, from the moment he enters the frame, that Stalker takes a dim view of this pair, even though the man says that the woman—whose name he can’t recall— has agreed to come to the Zone too, though, frankly, she does not seem to be dressed for any kind of expedition. She’s excited to meet an actual Stalker—evidently there’s quite an aura attached to this shadowy outlaw caste—but he has just one word for her: Go. It’s a man’s world, the Zone. She gets in the car and, pausing only to call Solonitsyn a cretin (or maybe she’s telling him that Stalker is a cretin), drives off—with his hat on the roof. It’s the first of several humorous moments in the film.
⁷

Stalker was not happy about the way this man brought along a woman and he’s not happy about the way that the man has been drinking. Yes, okay, I’ve been
drinking,
the man admits, but I’m not
drunk.
Half the population has a drink, the other half is drunk, he says. Is this an accurate reflection of drinking habits in the USSR? Was it one of the things Tarkovsky came to miss about
the slimy pond of his homeland?
⁸
A couple of times in his diaries, Tarkovsky talks about getting drunk and ‘go[ing]
on the booze’, but Stalker takes a dim view of drinking. At this stage, in fact, apart from the Zone, there’s nothing of which he does not take a dim view. The man takes a swig from a bottle; in the other hand he clutches a plastic bag, like a teenager with his stash of glue.

STALKER WALKS UP
the steps into a bar, the bar we saw earlier. Relatively speaking, customers are pouring in. Happy Hour in a place that looks like people need it. The windows, like the barman’s jacket, could do with a good clean. They afford only the dimmest view of the world outside. Stalker is followed by the man, who treats us to another bit of slapstick slipping convincingly on the steps. It’s not just customers—the gags are coming thick and fast now, it’s practically Buster Keaton round here, Buster Keaton in his long-lost, social-realist classic
Happy Hour.

THE TALL MAN,
the man we saw in the precredit sequence, is still there, drinking coffee, and the barman is still smoking. Not for the last time we are back where we started. We don’t need a sign to tell us this is the Last
Chance Saloon. Chance of getting a decent cappuccino? Zero. Hundred-percent-proof vodka? Now you’re talking. Stalker tells the tall fellow, Go ahead, have a drink— but when the other guy produces his bottle (he’s brought it with him into the bar, coals-to-Newcastle style) Stalker tells him to take it away. Okay, says the man, in the timehonoured sophistry of the alcoholic, we’ll drink beer instead. The barman pours him a beer. Stalker glances at his watch, the watch he’s stolen from his wife, a gesture of impatience and anxiety that the audience may or may not share. All the time the barman is pouring his drink the man is holding the glass, eager to get on the outside of what’s inside it. The moment the barman has stopped pouring he downs it in one—attaboy!—and by the time the barman has finished filling two other glasses, he’s ready for a refill. At the heart of the Zone is the Room, a place where—we will learn later—your deepest wish will come true, but one gets the impression that
this
room is his Room, that his deepest wish is being catered for right here, chain-swilling beer.
⁹
He brings the refill and two
other glasses over to Stalker and the tall man. He’s about to introduce himself, but Stalker (played by Aleksandr Kaidanovsky) tells him his name is Writer and the tall guy’s name is Professor (Nikolai Grinko). Ah, hints of the heist here: Mr. Pink, Mr. White and all that: generic code names in the style of
Reservoir Dogs.
Has Stalker been lured back into the Zone for one last job?

Every time I see people drinking in films I am immediately seized with a desire to have a drink myself. Certain countries—that is, the films produced by certain countries—tend to make particular drinks look especially alluring. French films, predictably, make one crave red wine, but whites with a château on the label look pretty good too. Whiskey looks good in westerns. (‘Men swaggering into saloons. Thirsty from cattle drives.’) Beer looks good anywhere. And not just in films. In most countries of the world, even the shittiest ones, you can generally get your hands on a beer that is, as they say,
drinkable. Speaking of beer, we are interested, obviously, to see if Stalker is going to get one down him. Who knows, perhaps he’ll even get his round in? As it turns out, only Writer drinks anything at all. Professor sits with his coffee and Stalker just looks anxious. Writer is the one doing the drinking—maybe he should have been called Drinker—and he is also the one doing most of the talking. When Professor asks him what he writes he says one should write about ‘absolutely nothing.’ So, a Flaubertian in his way. In a letter of 1852 Flaubert announced his desire to write ‘a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible.’ In this direction, Flaubert believed, lay ‘the future of Art’: ‘There is no longer any orthodoxy, and form is as free as the will of its creator.’ Compared to content-driven Hollywood cinema this sounds like a reasonable prediction of what Tarkovsky would achieve in
Mirror
(the film he made before
Stalker):
not a film about nothing, obviously (it could equally claim to be a
film about everything), but one held uniquely together by the director’s style—‘the will of its creator’—rather than by the mechanical demands of narrative or ‘the burden of tradition.’ Flaubert concludes this interlude of speculation with an observation that could have come straight from Tarkovsky’s diaries: ‘From the standpoint of pure Art one might establish the axiom that there is no such thing as subject—style in itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.’

Anyway, they’re standing round the table in the bar, having a good old chat and a drink, though really Writer is the one doing most of the chatting and all of the drinking—and, in the time-honoured tradition of the drunkard, he’s repeating himself. He’s going on about triangles again, just as he was with the woman outside, before Stalker sent her packing. Triangles this, triangles that. He wonders why Professor is going to the Zone but then launches into his own explanation of why he’s going there, what he’s looking for. Inspiration, it turns out. He’s washed up. Finished. Maybe by going to the Zone he’ll be rejuvenated. Man, I know how he feels. I could do with a piece of that action myself. I mean, do you think I would be spending my time summarizing the action of a film almost devoid of action—not frame
by frame, perhaps, but certainly take by take—if I was capable of writing anything else? In my way I am going to the Room—following these three to the Room—to save myself.
¹⁰

All the time this conversation is going on, the camera is moving in, getting tighter, but so imperceptibly you can’t tell it’s happening until it’s happened, until we are practically leaning on the table with them. Often, in Tarkovsky, when we think something is still it’s not; at the very least, the frame is contracting or expanding slightly, almost as if the film were breathing.

We hear the hooting of a train, can hear that lonesome
whistle blow. So, this grim-looking bar does have several things going for it—if by ‘several’ we mean ‘one’, namely proximity to the railway station. The hooting grows louder. Do you hear it? Our train? says Stalker, checking his—i.e., his wife’s—watch.
¹¹
They get ready to leave the bar. No one says, ‘Drink up!’ but that’s pretty much the
idea. The camera continues to move in on Stalker, who says to Luger, the lugubrious barman—a type so strong and silent he could have found work as an actor back in the 1920s, before the introduction of sound—that if he doesn’t make it back, to ‘call’ on his wife. And what? Deliver a message of condolence? Sit there smoking a cigarette, silently? See if there’s any chance of her laundering his jacket? After this speech Stalker stares right at the camera. Writer is about to leave the bar, we see the back of his head and then he turns and stares straight at the camera so that, momentarily, in accord with the shot-reverse-shot convention, Stalker and Writer have both stared straight at each other. But it also seems that they are staring straight at us. This is in direct contravention of Roland Barthes’s edict in his essay ‘Right in the Eyes’, that, while it is permissible for the subject to stare into the lens—at the spectator—in a still photograph, ‘it is forbidden for an actor to look at the camera’ in a movie. So convinced was Barthes of his own rule that he was ‘not far from considering this ban as the cinema’s distinctive feature…If a single gaze from the screen came to rest on me, the whole film would be lost.’ In this case, the effect is to implicate us in the reciprocity of their gaze. We are going along for the ride too. We are one of them.

THEY
—
WE
—
HEAD OUTSIDE.
Stalker is carrying some kind of carry-out and he tramps through a puddle. This is no accident. Whatever else he may be, Stalker is a man with a MacArthur-like indifference to getting his feet wet. They clamber into a waiting jeep. The air is filled, now, with the constant blowing of the lonesome whistle. It is raining and the headlights of the jeep are pure white in the gloom and damp. Stalker is driving. Although we cannot see the rain falling through the air—it is drizzling, not pouring—we can see puddles, rain sprinkling the puddles and the headlights reflected in the puddles, and the jeep driving through the drizzled headlights of the puddles, driving through shrubbery, through damp and gloomy alleyways in which lingering mist still lingers. The jeep is perfectly chosen. No other vehicle could serve as well at this juncture. A Mini Cooper would have established a connection with
The Italian Job
(as
Nostalghia
should perhaps have been called) and the sleek convertible we saw at the beginning would have lent a touch of class and glamour, but the jeep, for all its discomfort, harks back to the Long Range Desert Group, to every movie ever made about the Second World War. It is the most swaggering of vehicles,
designed for gung-ho generals (Patton) and fearless war photographers (Capa) and, as such, is immune to traffic regulations and the slow congestion of supply convoys. It is synonymous with pure, rugged and
manly
adventure. They are overcoated commandos, these three (one of them will actually turn out to be an explosives expert), volunteers on a daring raid behind enemy lines, with more than a hint of
Last of the Summer Wine
thrown in.